Finally watched Return of the King: Extended Edition

It's been sitting in our living room for about a month, still shrink-wrapped. We fired up the DVD player last night and watched the first disc (of the actual movie: the film is two discs and the others are supplemental material) then the second this afternoon.

VAST improvement over the theatrical version but that's mostly because a lot of things that we barely saw in the original one are delved into more here (Faramir and Eowyn hitting it off in the Houses of Healing, the Mouth of Sauron riding out to "welcome" Gandalf and crew to Mordor, etc.) If Peter Jackson could be said to have made a mistake at all with this movie trilogy, it's that he didn't include Christopher Lee's scene as Saruman in the original, making it appear here for the first time. It's not that long a scene, but greatly adds to the story while wrapping up a few dangling threads (we now see how something so valuable as Saruman's palantir got thrown into the muddy water after the Ents trashed Isengard). It's also tons more bloody/gruesome than the first run.

We liked it :-)