The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

All right, I've finally seen it. In fact, I was watching it when the new year rang in. It was the next-to-last show that my free ticket (included in the Fellowship Extended DVD set) was valid for. I would have seen it earlier, but I was waiting to watch the extended version of Fellowship, first, so I'd be all refreshed on the characters and story.

I think I've mentioned before that my sister works for Technicolor Digital Cinema, which does the digital conversion of movies. Although Fellowship was never released digitally (Peter Jackson isn't a big proponent of digital screening, though even if he was I'm sure it'd be up to New Line more than anyone), when the Extended DVD was released, there was a contest and the winners were invited to an a digital screening of the Extended version of the movie. See, the theatrical movie department and the home video promotions department are separate, and the guys making the decisions in the home video sales department seem to be fans of digital, so they had the Extended version digitized just for the contest. This means that my sister's company has the Extended Fellowship on hard drive, and she popped it into the projector for me and my parents to watch in Technicolor's private screening room, a small theatre with push-button-controlled, electronic, leather recliners and some pretty sweet sound.

I was actually surprised that I had recognized as many new and extended scenes as I did, considering it's been almost a year since I saw the first one, and I only saw it twice. And seeing it projected, digitally, in that theatre is definitely the way to go! They keep all the movies they've digitized on hard drive, just in case. Movies like Harry Potter 2, Lilo and Stitch, Scooby Doo, and even Pluto Nash. You know you wanna see Pluto Nash. Don't deny it.

I liked Fellowship a lot. By the third time I saw it, I liked it better than ever. I liked Towers too. Just not as much. Oh, it was "a'ight." Do they still say "a'ight?" Fuck it, that's Middle Earth, I'm sure "a'ight" hadn't gone out of style there yet. There was some cool shit, especially in the big ol' battle for Helm's Deep. And Gollum really stole his scenes, hinting at the possible depths that a digital character could reach. No longer simply the cartoonish caricatures like Watto and Jar Jar!

Gimli: Legolas, two already!
Legolas: Seventeen!
[Kills two orcs]
Legolas: Nineteen!

Legolas was cool, but underused! The Aragorn/Legolas/Gimli storyline was weighted a little too heavily toward Aragorn and his little love triangle thing. I wanted to see Legolas doing more of his walking-on-top-of-the-snow tricks! Sure, it was cool to see him doing his rapid-fire archery and his quiver that never ran out, but he was a bit too much of a sidekick in this movie. Though speaking of Legolas' tricks, I thought the shot of him swinging up onto horse was kinda cool in concept, but looked a little too fake in execution. Gimli ended up as little more than the comic relief, with his one-liners. Those seemed the least Tolkienesque to me.

I think my experience suffered a little from less-than-optimal viewing conditions. It wasn't as bad as my second time seeing Fellowship, with the giggling, 12-year-old girls chattering away a couple of seats down. But the sound wasn't much better than seeing it on my TV (without the surround sound on) and the reel changes were abrupt and not too smooth. Basically, I had been spoiled by my recent digital viewing of Fellowship.

The first movie was epic. This movie seemed more episodic. This may have been due to the fact that it is the middle chapter, a bridge between Fellowship and Return of the King. But Peter Jackson clearly made an effort to structure the movie with a clear rise in action to a climax. Merry and Pippin have adventures which lead to the great Ent assault on Isengard. Frodo & Co. are captured, and face the danger of Man. The Three Amigos have the big build-up to the Battle of Helm's Deep. It's not as if the movie is all bridge. Maybe it seemed less grand because if the parallel storylines which never converged. This made it seem more like three one-hour episodes than like one big, three-hour epic like Fellowship. It's the separate adventures of those beloved characters from Fellowship.

Frodo: I am Frodo Baggins, and this is Samwise Gamgee.
Faramir: His bodyguard?
Sam: His gardener.

The movie seemed to have a few too many cheesy elements. I was pleasantly surprised that Gollum didn't turn out to be one of them. His inner Gollum/Smeagol conflict worked better than the Green Goblin's. In contrast, some of the human performers failed to measure up to his digital pathos. I had no problems with Frodo and Sam playing backdrop to Gollum, but Brad Dourif was just wa-a-a-ay too slimy. I mean, c'mon, the dude's name is already Wormtongue. If you were king would you take advice from him? Would you even let him into the castle in the first place? Evil works so much better when it's understated. I mean, watch Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan again. We all remember Montalban's outbursts, "From hell's heart I stab at thee!" but it's the earlier scenes when he was playing it all understated that really sold his menace. Look at Darth Vader, or Boba Fett. They spent most of their screen time standing quietly and looking badass. Sure, Wormtongue seemed, well, wormtonguey, but he looked like the kind of dude the sentries would have shot from the castle walls, while he was still 500 yards away, not like the guy they'd let into the king's chamber so he could weave his sinister magic.

Also, what was up with the big Sauron eye atop the tower of Barad Dur? I don't recall my Tolkien, but was Sauron's bigass eye supposed to be floating up there, all red and flamey, between the forks of his tower? I understood the eye in the first movie, where it was something of a symbol of his all seeing evilness, a terrifying vision which characters would see in their crystal balls or when the Ring exerted its power. But in Towers suddenly it's floating up there like a radar dish, complete with tendrils of yellow lightning between it and the tines of the tower.

Plus, there was a bit too much running around in broad daylight for my liking. Fellowship was moody and atmospheric. Even the scenes that weren't dark had a very evocative mood about them. It created a world where pointy-eared elf people are right at home with dwarves and hobbits. It was Middle Earth. But the Rohan people running around in the sunshine in their medieval dresses seemed a bit like refugees from Xena. Frankly, even the big, final battle of Fellowship, in the forest in the middle of the day, looked kind of fakey to me. Much lower in production value than the picture's other set pieces. More like "let's go out to the park and shoot some fighting," with a couple of fake ruins strewn about. But the rest of Fellowship was so good, and the acting was so compelling, that you didn't notice as much. And the orcs and Uruk-Hai, as cool as they look, don't fare as well under the unforgiving kiwi sun of Towers as they did in the stylized lighting of Fellowship. This didn't seem so much like Middle Earth as it did central New Zealand. And even worse was the scene of the Warg riders' attack. Those CGI Wargs looked about as convincing as the sheep-like shaaks from Attack of the Clones. Finally, the manner in which, by the final hour of the movie, every line delivered was a dramatic, soul-wrenching declaration accompanied by the camera dollying or zooming in to close-up, well, too became a bit tiring.

Speaking of fake, some of those closeups of Merry and Pippin as they rode on Treebeard, peering over the trees into the distance, well they were not proud moments for the continuing art of shooting with bluescreen. However, it was nice to see their characters receive a bit of much-needed development as they graduated from Fellowship's comic relief to environmental heroes in their own right. If the former front men of this band, Frodo and Sam, were going to become bit players, at least the story benefitted by the deepening of some of their backup band members.

Still, complaints aside, there was no shortage of coolness in Towers. Strider doing his tracking thing, that was pretty cool. He is a Ranger after all, and it was nice to see some of those skillz coming into play. And yeah, big chunks of exploded wall falling on armies of Uruk-Hai is cool. So is Saruman the White getting his comeuppance thanks to a collapsing dam and some pissed-off flora.

I'll admit, it was something of a shift to see characters who were so important in Fellowship become supporting background characters in Towers. Gandalf, the initiator of the quest, pops in for a couple of scenes. Saruman, such an imposing force in Fellowship, is more the generalissimo here. Elrond and Arwen end up as forced flashbacks. Captain Faramir of Gondor is a pale second to his brother, Fellowship's intense, tortured Boromir, teetering on the edge of corruption. Shieldmaiden Eowyn, her stick-up-his-ass brother Eomer (who, I think, had a little too much starch in his armor), and the medieval James Bond villain Wormtongue struck me as second-stringers compared to the original Fellowship. But I hold fast to my faith that, once seen as a whole, uninterrupted unit, Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings saga will stand as an example of what an epic can be, and how a genre film can stand its ground dramatically and artistically against more conventional dramas.

I look forward to seeing Return of the King. Hopefully it will place Towers into a context which will make the entire saga stronger as a whole. I certainly have greater hopes for that than I would if the sequels to Fellowship were in fact typical Hollywood sequels made under typical circumstances. But this unique project, a single 10-or-so hour long movie released in three parts, leaves me with the hope that the final product will be worth the effort. Maybe New Line will even front the money to kick off The Hobbit as a follow-up. Then what next? Tales from The Silmarillion?