Frodo and Sam make their last push towards Mount Doom where they must destroy the ring and bring about the end of Sauron's spreading darkness. Aragorn finally acknowledges his role as the peoples King and Gandalf gets a lot of repressed anger off his chest in the many battles against the dark lord's minions. The final instalment of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy sets new heights for the term ‘epic'; visually the film is breathtaking and against the odds Jackson manages to keep the varying threads of the story intact without losing the plot, which at over three hours long is no mean feat. Taken in its entirety Lord of the Rings is a seminal piece of populist cinema, a perfectly realised creation of simple bums on seats entertainment that's likely to haunt Hollywood's money makers for decades to come.