Success Quote by Ralph Bakshi

Bakshi’s complaint isn’t just a director’s cut gripe; it’s a statement about what kind of myth he wanted The Lord of the Rings to be. Ending on Helm’s Deep would have made the story close on a visceral, comprehensible high: the siege breaks, the cavalry arrives, the audience exhales. It’s the clean geometry of popular cinema, where victory is legible and the credits roll on a hard-won uplift.

The subtext is frustration with the machinery that flattens an artist’s structure into a product schedule. Bakshi’s 1978 film was famously unfinished, split in two with the second part never made. So “the one they released” reads like a wound: not only a compromised ending, but a public version that locks in the compromise as if it were his choice. He’s arguing for authorial intent, but also for dignity - the right to be judged on the story he designed, not the story the marketplace allowed.

There’s also a canny understanding of narrative psychology. Tolkien’s saga is deliberately anti-final: battles are won, the war continues, meaning is deferred. Bakshi, working in a medium and era less forgiving of open arcs, grasps that you sometimes need a stopgap finale that feels like an ending even when it isn’t. Helm’s Deep is that: contained, spectacular, and emotionally complete, even as it dodges the larger tragedy and exhaustion that make Tolkien’s ending so strange.

Underneath it all is a director insisting that pacing is ideology. Where you end decides what the story was really about.