There's a sequence an hour into Peter Jackson's The Return of the King (New Line), the final film of his The Lord of the Rings trilogy, that renders any narrative confusions, any objections to the lack of fidelity to J.R.R. Tolkien's original, any lingering doubts about the scale of this accomplishment, magnificently irrelevant. The armies of Sauron--hundreds of thousands of Orcs--are heading for the seven-tiered "city of kings" called Minas Tirith, where the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and hobbit Pippin (Billy Boyd) are attempting to convince a dangerously depressed and unhinged ruler, Denethor (John Noble), to call in reinforcements. Pippin is dispatched to climb a tower, slip past the guards, and set fire to a huge beacon as a signal to Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), the future king, across the plains at Edoras, the Rohan capital. What happens when Pippin fulfills his mission is breathtaking: Jackson's camera soars, godlike, to the next Olympian peak, where watchers light their own beacon, and then to the next and the next and the next, until, in Edoras, Mortensen's Aragon turns his blue eyes to the light on yonder mount and asks the men of Rohan to ride into battle.

Of all the things to love about The Return of the King, it's those lightning shifts in scale that I find the most thrilling. I don't mean just the sudden impossible hugeness of it--those hundreds of thousands of demonic Orcs led by massive trolls and winged dragons called Fell Beasts and eight-story elephants called Mumakil as they surge toward a seven- tiered city that soars into the sky. I mean the way Jackson cuts from that amazing vision to something small: a spiked wheel grinding as the heavy gates of the city close; then a human face--Pippin, say, with his mouth grimly set and his eyes shocked open; then a few hundred thousand more marauding Orcs. So you get eye-popping spectacle, then a close-up with texture and weight, then a flash of human emotion, then more eye- popping spectacle. The threads are awesome, but it's the weave--of the epic and the intimate, the airy and the visceral, the lofty and the blood-curdling--that's spellbinding.

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