Finally: The Two Towers

December 22, 2002

So after a year of listening to people babble on and on about the first film, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy finally continues on with The Two Towers. I really liked the first movie, despite not being a huge fan of the books (granted, I haven’t read them in almost a decade). It condensed the sprawling book into a blend of good action and fun character work, while maintaining the grandiose scope and epic worldbuilding of the Tolkien originals. Peter Jackson’s always been one of my favorites, and with this trilogy he’s jumped from being one of the world’s most underrated directors to being one it’s premiere names.

So how’s the second chapter? It’s pretty good. It didn’t really blow me away like the first one, but I don’t think that’s surprising. The world is essentially the same as the first, and you only really get one chance at being new. The movie plods along for its first hour or two, but saves itself by pulling out all the stops at Helms Deep, the climactic battle for the men of Rohan.

While quite a bit of plot happens in the beginning, I really didn’t find any of it particularly interesting or dramatic. A lot of the dialogue is perfunctory and awkward, put in strictly to explain the happenings (even if we’re seeing it happen in front of us anyway). As a result, you get a lot of random closeups of Legolas saying stuff like “the red sun rises. Blood has been spilled this night.” It’s all fine and good but it’s not particularly interesting, you know? Especially since we saw all the blood being spilled.

All the returning characters from the first film pretty much cycle through the same emotional notes without a lot of change. Gandalf’s a bit livelier, Merry’s a bit smarter and Gimli talks too much now, but other than that it’s fairly unchanged. Aragorn’s still badass, Frodo and Sam still are a bit too friendly to each other, and Legolas is still the Pretty One. A lot of this stems from the broken fellowship and the resulting troika of plot threads. There isn’t a lot of time to get around to all three plots and make them all work well.

The newer characters (mostly humans from Rohan) fare better. Theoden and Eowyn both have lots of good character bits, and show themselves as characters you want to know better. Grima Wormtongue is perfectly evil in his brief appearances. Just as an aside: How does anyone know this guy ISN’T evil? His last name is WORMTONGUE. The completely computer generated Gollum is very impressive from a technical standpoint. His face is very expressive and for the believable. It looks a lot like Don Knotts/Steve Buscemi, but it works. While his character and his struggle against himself lies is an important part of the story, I found his long Oscar-clip style monologues a bit tiresome. The ring fucked you up, we get it.

By the third hour, everything has advanced sufficiently to get three real payoffs, cut together perfectly. There are three battles going on, but enough down time in each plotline to intercut with each other to prevent battle fatigue in the viewers. As the movie closes, everyone’s biting their own arms off waiting for the next one. So in that sense, The Two Towers is a rousing success.

One thing that’s bothered me about the LOTR trilogy so far is how generic Jackson’s shot choices are. There aren’t a lot of decisions or compositions that really jump out at me as stylistically Jackson work. From the “making of” material that I’ve seen, Jackson seems to have given a lot of stuff filmed by second, third and FOURTH units. After he recuperates from the trilogy, it will be interesting to see him get at some something smaller where he can let his oddball sensibilities run free again.

Posted in Moving Pictures