"The Two Towers"
by
"Michael Stone"

Having seen "The Fellowship of the Rings" several times over the last year and watched the expanded cut twice in the last few weeks, I was a little surprised at how different "The Two Towers" feels from the first film. The tone of TTT is markedly different. The first film set up the characters and gave us an introduction to a fantastic realm of non-human creatures. "The Two Towers" though spends most of its time in the more familiar world of men and the dangerous forces gathering against them. It's a grimmer, darker movie that left me a little sad for the last movie, but then I guess I'm not feeling anything the characters in the movie don't feel, which may be the subtlest achievement of the film.
"The Two Towers" covers a lot of ground, not always cleanly and clearly, because of the problems associated with telling three parallel stories and assorted small subplots. The tone of the movie is markedly different from the first and Jackson has to introduce the new characters here mostly in a hurry. Although we catch brief glimpses of some of the settings and characters from before, most of the second film takes place in the world of men, and with the exception of Treebeard and Gollum, all the new characters are from the human kingdoms adjacent to Mordor who have fought the rising tide of evil from it for some time now. At three hours the movie is a little choppy in spots, and it's even missing bits and pieces already shown in the trailers and the film books, but it barely matters because what's on the screen is so visually compelling. "Towers" extends the amazing computer imagery from the first film not only into creating amazing settings and action, but into believable characters. Treebeard, an ancient giant walking tree, is amazing enough on his own, but the real breakthrough is Gollum. Yes, he still looks like a computer animated creature, but part of that is our knowledge that no one like that could be real. Make allowances for that, and you find Gollum inhabits the same space as Sean Astin and Elijah Woods as a real actor. Plus, Gollum is no easy character to get "right" as a schizophenric, goggle-eyed wretch both pathetic and dangerous. It helped that Gollum was acted by Andy Sirkis ( who provides the voice ) onstage with Astin and Woods then replaced with his computer alter-ego, but it still couldn't bring the character to visual life and reality unless the science and art were there. Peter Jackson's WETA group has really pioneered a great, if not greater, leap in special effects than ILM.
000200000C1B00000A30 C15, If I do have any quibbles about the film, other than having to wait a year for the end film and nearly two years for the complete expanded version, it's missing many of the characters from the first film. "Fellowship" immersed us in such magical realms as the worlds of the elves and dwarfs that the world of men looks a little prosaic. Hugo Weaving, Liv Tyler, and Cate Blanchet all make cameo appearances, but I still missed them nonetheless. Both Ian McKellan and Christopher Lee both have little screen time here as well. Instead, we get new characters such as the aged King Theoden ( Bernard Hill ), his duplicitous "adviser", Grima Wormtongue ( Brad Dourif ), Theoden's daughter Eowyn ( Miranda Otto ) and son Eomer ( Karl Urban ). Dourif is easily the most fun, providing a new screen standard in loathsomeness, while Bernard Hill gives a magisterial performance as the old king who knows he must rouse himself and his people for one last battle, despite the overwhelming odds that they will lose. Otto looks good at looking good, although her character has the unhappy count against her of essentially being a woman trying to woo Aragorn from his elf love. Of the returning main characters, the lighthearted mood of the first film is gone and everyone gets to be little more than grim for three hours, which they all do well even if it is a little hard to watch three hours of it.
Despite even if it is a little hard to watch three hours of it.
Despite some minor quibbles though, "The Two Towers" is the best movie of 2002; visually breathtaking ( it's too bad you don't have a "Best Landscape" Oscar - New Zealand would win in a walk ), epic in scope and scale, and flawlessly acted. The Academy, half-assed jerkoffs that they tend to be, is likely to screw it out of Best Picture again and give it to some navel-gazing piece of self-important lint, but we know what people will be watching long after "The Road to Perdition" and "About Schmidt" are forgotten...