The King Has Returned

I’ve often said that the Oscars are given out too early.  If you really want to know what movie is the Best Picture of a particular year, wait ten years and then hand out the awards.  I’d bet most of the time you would get a different result.

2004, however, was the year The Return of the King won Best Picture and something tells me that we wouldn’t see too many people shouting for Peter Jackson to return his trophy.  I wonder, though, how the movie would have been different if it had been about another King.

Not Elvis.  I don’t know crap about Elvis.

Here in Minnesota, we have a winter carnival wherein we celebrate the idiotic weather as a means to pretend that it isn’t slowly driving us insane.  The carnival is ruled by King Boreas, who is locked in battle with Vulcanus Rex and his Vulcan Krewe for control of the Minnesota climate.

Boreas is defeated, of course, because winter must eventually give way to spring.  And so it does.  About three months after the winter carnival ends.  If the guy playing King Boreas is smart, he goes into hiding once the carnival is over.

What if Return of the King was about King Boreas? It makes sense, right?  Aaragorn Boreas is away from the white city (white = snow) but he returns to take down Sauron Rex and his Orc Krewe.

Sauron will always defeat winter unless Frodo can cast the ring into the fire.  In this narrative, the ring is global warming and if Sauron can get his hands on it, he will be able to slowly heat Middle Earth over several decades, eventually flooding the cities that lie near the ocean.

I know it doesn’t seem like any city in Middle Earth lies near an ocean but trust me, there probably are some of them and this plan of Sauron Rex’s is pretty sinister.  For the cities next to the ocean.  That we don’t know about.

We do know that it would take a lot longer for the elves to sail to the undying lands if the water rose.  SINISTER!!!!

Aaragorn Boreas is, of course, aided by a white wizard (white = snow) in his quest to bring healing cold to the realms of Middle Earth.  Because Middle Earth is overheated.

Now this all makes sense because every evil thing in Middle Earth seems to have something to do with fire.  Sauron is a big flaming eye.  Smaug is a fire-breathing dragon.  The Balrog seems to be, basically, a flaming Kaiju. Saurumon burns a shit ton of trees.

They want Middle Earth to get hotter and hotter but Aragorn knows that the natural cycle of the seasons must be allowed to continue.  We cannot appreciate spring without winter, he reasons.  A really long winter with several feet of snow and months of days below zero.  You go through that shit and you can really appreciate summer.

So Aaragorn returns to the White City, where there is no snow because Sauron Rex has been slowly warming the climate aided, in no small part, by the greenhouse gasses Sauroman has produced by burning Fangorn forest.  Or whatever forest he burned.  That part isn’t all that important.  It was a big forest, though.

Aaragorn is also aided by an army of the dead, who are mostly skeletons with bleached white bones (WHITE = SNOW).  That means he brings snow back to the city in the form of the undead army!

Then Frodo throws global warming into a volcano and it starts to snow for real! It isn’t just the ashes of the undead army produced when Aaragorn decides to release them from their vow.  It is real snow.

BOOM!  Story over.  Winter has returned to Middle Earth!

Then the movie goes on for about thirty more minutes.  We learn that Saruon Rex comes back every winter and they have a Carnival of the Ring where a Hobbit has to get a replica of the one ring into the volcano before Sauron can find him.  Hobbits are chosen from the twelve Hobbit districts and they must compete in a game.  The victor gets to climb mount doom and get his fingers bitten off by the previous year’s winner, who has slowly been driven insane by his inability to write.

Everyone enjoys that for a few hundred years and then they all move to California.

My point here is this, if they had written a movie like the one I’ve gone through here, they never would have won a single Oscar