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Two hobbits find a ring while fishing and are seized with an urge to own it; one, Smeagol, murders his friend and degenerates into the creature known as Gollum. Currently, Gollum is guiding Frodo Baggins, the ringbearer, and his friend Sam into the dark land of Mordor (where Frodo intends to destroy the all-powerful ring) but he is plotting to have the hobbits killed and take back his 'precious'. In the aftermath of the battle of Helm's Deep and the defeat of the wizard Saruman, the remainder of the Fellowship of the Ring - wizard Gandalf, human Aragorn (possible heir to the kingdom of Gondor), elf Legolas, hobbits Pippin and Merry and dwarf Gimli - are allied with King Theoden of Rohan and his niece Eowyn - the orcish armies of Sauron continue to wage war against mankind, now turning their attack from Rohan to Gondor.

Gandalf insists that Theoden aid Gondor in the war and sets out with Pippin to persuade Denethor, steward of Gondor, to mount a strong defence to keep the forces of evil occupied so that Frodo can get to Mount Doom, the only place where the ring can be destroyed. Denethor, maddened by the death of his son Boromir, sends his less-loved son Faramir off in a futile battle. In Mordor, Gollum turns Frodo against Sam; the ringbearer tries to send his friend back, only to be led by Gollum into the lair of Shelob, a giant spider who paralyses him and wraps him in her web. Eowyn and Merry both resent being excluded from the armies sent to defend Gondor and join up anyway, while Aragorn seeks an alliance with an army of ghosts earthbound by an earlier betrayal. Sam finds Frodo and, thinking him dead, takes the ring. Frodo later revives and is reunited with his friend, to press on to Mount Doom. The hordes of Sauron attack Gondor and the forces of good resist. In battle, the ghosts redeem themselves and pass on to another plane; Eowyn and Merry defeat Sauron's most fearsome lieutenant and the orcish hordes are broken. In Mount Doom, Frodo hesitates to destroy the ring and Gollum makes a last grab for it, dying in a vain attempt to preserve it from destruction. With the ring melted, the power of Sauron is broken and an age of magic comes to an end. Aragorn is crowned king of Gondor and the hobbits return to the Shire. With the age of men upon Middle-Earth, the elves depart in a boat, taking Frodo and his uncle Bilbo, once a ringbearer himself, with them.

As if realising that the third part of his Lord of the Rings triptych will be concerned with such momentous business that tiny felicities are liable to get squeezed, Peter Jackson opens The Return of the King with its smallest denizen, a wriggling worm destined to be impaled on a fish-hook by a beaming, puckish hobbit. It's almost a joke at the expense of the remembering-who-everybody-is phase of the picture that the cheery hobbit fisherman turns out not to be one of the four 'halflings' among the Fellowship but Andy Serkis as Smeagol, the previously unseen, pre-corruption incarnation of Gollum. The idyll - and for the pre-PC Tolkien, fishing, like smoking, boozing and leching after barmaids, is an archetypally innocent pastime - is darkened once the ring is found at the bottom of the stream, and two mates out for a pleasant trip are turned into grasping killers in a mini rerun of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). Smeagol's murder of his friend sets him on the path of transformation, vividly depicted in several stages, into the monstrous yet pathetic Gollum - who seems to be remembering this incident as we are dropped back into the narrative at the point where it was left at the end of The Two Towers.

The major challenge here is that the meat of the story and the emotional involvement are with Frodo, Gollum and Sam while all other business - far more conventionally spectacular - is essentially a side-issue, a monumental feint orchestrated to keep the villains busy elsewhere while victory is won (though not easily) by throwing a trinket into a stream of molten lava. Whereas Tolkien had to interleave whole chapters on his various strands, Jackson can punctuate the central quest with snippet-like asides that keep us updated on what everyone is doing. Occasionally, he tries shorthand - unwieldy in the dialogue that glosses over what happened to Saruman, and more effective in the simple, ballad-scored précis of Faramir's doomed ride against Sauron's orc armies (we stay with Pippin, forced to sing as the maddened Denethor picks at a meal after sending his surviving son to what turns out to be less than certain death). Nevertheless, all the cutting back and forth does undermine the general forward movement of the piece and sometimes gives the picture the air of a soap opera playing Dungeons & Dragons.

There is a great deal of bitty material to get through, as all the characters have to do something to justify their presence: Eowyn, configured by Miranda Otto as a post-Tolkien woman warrior, eclipses the giant spider Shelob - who would otherwise be the film's strongest female character - by besting a dark lord who has claimed no man can defeat him with the cheeralong statement "I am no man"; the elf Legolas gets one sustained heroic sequence as he single-handedly boards and brings down a lumbering war-elephant (after the manner of the lone samurai who downs an attack helicopter in the Sonny Chiba movie Time Slip: The Day of the Apocalypse) before taking a well-earned bow. Jackson, confident in his effects team and post-production skills, puts on screen images that would have defeated any pre-CGI film-maker: vast chunks of masonry catapulted from the ramparts of a besieged city to squash dozens of photo-realistic orc goons, answered by equally devastating missiles from the attacking armies. Still, the most resonant moments are in the dark with the three ‘small' characters: a giant spider attack scene guaranteed 75 per cent scarier than the one in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and character business as Gollum cunningly makes a rift between Frodo and honest, lumpen Sam (like Sancho Panza, the real hero and identification figure).

A point comes when it's hard to tell whether praise or criticism is due to Jackson for his adaptation or Tolkien for his original text, which presents at least as many traps as opportunities. The side of the novel that seems twee and arch, epitomised by the songs and Hobbiton knee's-ups, is kept in check until the epilogue, when it is unleashed along with the complex, very hard-to-dramatise bitter pill that the heroic triumph of the story which brings about 'the Age of Men' also means an end to the age of appealing magic that is the setting. As the elves' boat sails off, Tolkien may have recalled the final chapter of The House at Pooh Corner, where Christopher Robin grows up and puts away childish things so that the Hundred Acre Wood survives only as a cherished memory; but he was also writing at the time of The Searchers (1956), in which John Wayne has to walk off into the desert as the door shuts on him (the last image here is another door shutting, this one sealing Sam inside his happy home). Also problematic is that all richness of character is on one side (Gollum, though ultimately corrupted, is not a minion of Sauron), and so we see how the forces of good are riven by personality conflicts, misjudgements and prejudices while the hordes of evil are monolithically rotten. History suggests that societies like Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia collapse because it's impossible for self-seeking bad men to make common cause, but the armies of Mordor march as one.

Considered as a stand-alone film, The Return of the King plays least well of the three: it's three-quarters climax and one quarter straggling epilogue. The reintroduction of lan Holm's Bilbo comes well after business has satisfyingly been concluded and demands a shift of attention when general audiences will be reaching for their coats. However, as the last act of a nine-hours-plus movie, it fits perfectly, the pay-off after the division of forces at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring - when Frodo reacts to seeing Gandalf again, you have to work hard to remember that he thought the wizard died back in the first film. Now it's over, the production of The Lord of the Rings has to take its place in film history: certainly, it exposes the initial Star Wars trilogy as a mere rough draft (any objections to the resolution evaporate at recall of the dancing Ewoks of Return of the Jedi) and it stands as the most successful filming of a monumental bestseller since Gone with the Wind (1939). That it won't stand as substitute for the original in the way that the Selznick picture does for Margaret Mitchell's (now unreadable) book is down to the fact that Tolkien can't be processed into a film equivalent as comfortably, and that the novel has been around unfilmed for so long that it has displaced its own cultural water separate from any movie version. However, the sense of what is possible in mainstream cinema has been changed by Jackson's achievement in ways that will take a while to assimilate.

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