THE TWO TOWERS

7/10

aka The Lord of the Rings – the Two Towers : NZ (NZ/USA) 2002 : Peter Jackson : 179 mins

first (slightly breathless and chaotic) rough reaction:

Two Towers turns out to be  surprisingly similar to Fellowship, apart from being much more of a Western-type story, with lots of shots of horse-riders speeding across the countryside to protect/save imperilled folk. I was expecting something very different and darker, with more action - well, the last hour is certainly action-packed (though P.Jackson kind of screws it up by cutting away from the good stuff - the siege at Helm's Deep - to very quiet forest stuff with hobbits and talking giant trees, the Ents) but it's really very much the same as before: perhaps not -too- surprising, as Lord of the Rings isn't three separate movies, but one very long film released in three installments.

As before, some stupendous visual stuff, especially when Jackson gets to do 'aerial shots' of computer-generated material: Helm's Deep, and (perhaps even more amazing to look at) the Ents' attack on Isengard. But just as you're marvelling at something you've never seen on a cinema screen before, Jackson goes and drops some clanger. After Helm's Deep, he has Sam Gangee delivering a very windy, gloopy 'moral' about there being "some good in this world" that is far too Spielbergian. Then, remarkable as the Ent attack on Isengard is, we don't actually see how it ends - this feels like an oversight. And while Jackson is brilliant in the air, he's very ordinary on the ground - as in 'Fellowship', many sequences are direct steals from either Legend, or Michael Mann's The Keep, or both. There are far, far too many shots of dishevelled, saucer-eyed young moppets that look like out-takes from Reign of Fire (as do some of the dragons). Not enough to do : Christopher Lee, Cate Blanchett (the briefest of cameos), Liv Tyler (whose romantic-interlude flashback with Aragorn stops the movie dead in its tracks). Effective newcomers : Bernard Hill, Karl Urban, David Wenham (whose Faramir is the closest the movie comes to a genuinely ambiguous figure), Miranda Otto (though underused). The comic relief is much more smoothly integrated this time - mainly via Gimli, but also in the many scenes featuring Gollum (a CGI creation very reminiscent of Harry Potter's Dobby, though the theft was probably J K Rowling from Tolkien) - especially when he does his Willem-Dafoe-In-Spider-Man "dialogues" with himself.

As before, most of the dialogue (when it's audible) is fairly dopey, and needs an Ian McKellen (or a Brad Dourif, who is outstanding in his brief appearances here) to make it sound good. Worse, there's once again some very dubious ideological stuff underpinning it all. The battle between 'good and evil' (which is extremely simplistic on both sides - just when the world doesn’t need an injection of Manichean dualism) is, in effect, a battle to retain an aristocracy based on serfdom. It's not quite as bad as the animated Anastasia blaming the devil for the Russian revolution (via Rasputin), but it's not that far off - Jackson even has the Klingon-like Uruk'hai talking (absurdly) like Cockney gangsters. There's especially cringe-making scene where picturesquely scruffy-but- happy peasants bow and scrape before their king. And this time the bad guys' activity is actually referred to as "industry" - a bit rich, considering the amount of 'industry' that goes into any work of cinema, especially one on this scale.

On the level of sheer movie-craft eye-candy, however, The Two Towers delivers extremely strongly - lots of sweaty-palm stuff in the tense bit and some genuinely magical moments all the way through: even the throwaway background details are sometimes breathtaking - watch how Legolas mounts his horse. But big is, for Jackson, the most beautiful: the Ents striding towards Isengard (Birnam-wood style) - then, during the battle, bracing themselves to withstand a flood... perhaps the most remarkable single image in cinema this year.