Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
Directed by Peter Jackson
Written by Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, Stephen Sinclair, Frances Walsh
Starring Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen
Classification: AA
Rating: ***
Well, here it is. The infernal second instalment of The Lord of the Rings, director Peter Jackson's three-part, $300-million adaptation of the J. R. R. Tolkien trilogy.
Think of it is as Gangs of Middle-earth, featuring immense barbarian battles with an assortment of allied and warring tribes, demonstrations of medieval siege craft, entrails-spilling hand-to-hand combat, and mountains of corpses.
Through it all, at hourly intervals, we return to the wide-eyed Frodo clutching his ring to his little chest and struggling with the temptation to use it. He is still making his way to Mordor to rid himself of the evil jewellery and prevent the dark lord Sauron from materializing.
Director Jackson's reconstructed and transformed New Zealand is still the star of the series, a field of Armageddon, as the camera swoops under bruise-coloured skies, round white-capped peaks and stares up at sheer walls of castles and across plains throbbing with roaring armies.
This is literally spectacular, but some ambivalence is unavoidable. Please feel free to declare a masterpiece if you want, but also don't feel too guilty if you nod off.
The truth is, The Two Towers is both a triumph of design and cinematic engineering and, at the same time, long, repetitious and naive. The subject is evil (the title refers to the stronghold of wizard Saruman and the fortress of the dark lord Sauron), which seems to be a force inevitably associated with loud shouting, foul weather, bad teeth and loud music -- in other words, a lot like a British heavy-metal band.
The Hobbit heroes serve as a stand-in for half-grown male innocents. There is nothing resembling adult sexuality (there is a scene where an unconscious Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) dreams of Arwen (Liv Tyler) nuzzling him, but she morphs into his horse when he comes to.
If The Fellowship of the Ring movie tended to be too episodic, it was graced with a playful lightness: The differences in scale between the diminutive hobbit, Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm) and his gangly wizard friend, Gandalf (Ian McKellen) established the playful humour; visits to the shimmery elf princess Arwen again emphasized the magical world.
With The Two Towers, we are in the heavy-weather mid-section of the epic plot, nearly all action and momentum, with character and humour given short shrift. The members of the fellowship of the ring are split up and almost constantly under threat of death.
Jackson and his screenwriters have cut and shifted chapters of the book to intercut between three separate plot lines. While Frodo (Elijah Wood) and Sam (Sean Astin) head toward Mordor to dispose of the ring, they are chased by the movie's most interesting character, Gollum/Smeagol, a small, bald, pink computer-generated homunculus (voiced in a hissing, peevish voice by Andy Serkis) who looks either like a dying old man or an emaciated baby, and carries on angry debates between the two sides of his personality.
When the hobbits capture him, he agrees to lead them to Mordor in exchange for his freedom. Gollum is the archetypal conniving slave figure. The resemblances to both Jar Jar Binks of the Star Wars movies and Dobby from Harry Potter are striking: In these overdetermined computer-generated spectacles of one-dimensional good versus evil, these strange animal-human slave creatures seem to serve as a kind of escape valve for the movies' anarchic impulses.
Meanwhile, the manly soldier Aragorn (Mortensen, who has a knack of causing women in the audience to make small moaning sounds whenever he appears on screen), the elf Legolas (Orlando Bloom) and Gimli, the fierce dwarf (John Rhys-Davies), are on their way to save King Theoden (Bernard Hill).
Thanks to some timely intervention by Gandalf (McKellen), who has returned from his big tumble in the first movie and is now transfigured in glowing white robes with a bleached beard, King Theoden is awakened from a spell in time to defend his castle against the hordes assembled by the evil wizard Saruman (Christopher Lee).
Aragorn even has a hint of a flirtation with an earthly girl, the princess Eowyn (Miranda Otto), before everyone gets down to hacking body parts in the climatic nighttime battle scene.
The third part of the story (and most truncated from Tolkien's writing) concerns the other two hobbits, Merry (Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd), who are captured in the forest by Treebeard (the voice of Rhys-Davies again), a gruff old talking tree who shepherds other trees in the forest and carries them about in his branches. Eventually, the hobbits convince Treebeard and his fellow stomping trees to help in the battle against the dark forces, which are as apt to chop wood as they are flesh and bone. As effects, the talking, walking object-tossing trees are compelling (though we saw them before in The Wizard of Oz back in 1939).
The final battle scene, with evocations of the Japanese master filmmaker, Akira Kurosawa, lies somewhere between sublime and idiotic.
The various tribes and species pullulate until it would take an encyclopedia to keep them straight: Humans, elves, dwarfs, orcs, wizards, Uruk-hai, Easterlings, Oliphants (elephant-like creatures employed by Sauron's forces), the Nazgul (or Ringwraiths) and Wargs.
The sublimity is the vast scale, the overhead shots and elaborate choreography of the gargantuan battle.
The idiocy is the sheer imbalance between good and bad: While the good characters bounce back from any multistorey fall, the fierce orc soldiers crumble, collapse and flip off barricades by the deadly dozen.
These are in the tradition of the war-whooping Indians in a western, or the Germans in any American war movie, who die by the dozen for every one of the good guys.
The Two Towers puts us face to face with evil, and then shows it folding up like a Japanese fan.
Liam Lacey