Review: The Two Towers (Peter Jackson)
Apr. 1st, 2006 09:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nebroadwe[Reposted here for my own reference; originally written after seeing the December 2002 theatrical release.]
Short take (no spoilers):
Wow. Argh. Wow. Argh. Wow. Argh. Wow. Argh. Wow. Argh ...
Long take (spoilers ho, both for _The Two Towers_ and, prospectively, for Return of the King):
I enjoyed this movie, with reservations.
I am not a text purist, but having read LOTR so many times, I can't help watching the film as an adaptation of the book. I'm immediately aware of deviations from and rearrangements of the narrative; what keeps me from being a text purist is that I don't reflexively object to them. :-) As an adaptation, TTT is less strong than FOTR not because it plays fast and loose with the text, but because the changes it chooses to make do not always serve the story well. And (as Tolkien once remarked of the book), the film is too short.
More so than when watching FOTR, I had the feeling that TTT was cramming four hours of plot into three hours of moviegoing. It's obvious from the trailers that a lot of scenes were left on the cutting-room floor; in particular, the background to Haldir's Elvish contingent arriving at Helm's Deep was conspicuous by its absence. (My objection to having Elves, other than Legolas, in Rohan probably goes without saying by now. Mind you, though, they are fun to watch dicing up orcs, and Howard Shore's rewriting of the Lothlorien theme as a march is a delight to hear.) The need to cut back and forth between four plot strands -- two major (Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli in Rohan / Frodo, Sam and Gollum on the way to Mordor), one minor (Merry and Pippin and the Ents), and a mini (Arwen, Aragorn and Elrond), none of which intersect -- makes the film an editor's nightmare, almost unavoidably choppy. This problem is most apparent during the first twenty minutes, when everyone's story is being established; thereafter the editing team does a commendable job minimizing it. Despite the occasional abrupt shift, I seldom felt that I was being hurried from one locale to the next. The exceedingly difficult transitions between Rohan and Rivendell were especially well-handled, not just editorially but also musically and by the actors.
My chief worry going in, that the Ring-quest would get short shrift in favor of the War in the West, turned out to be unfounded. Helm's Deep is clearly the money sequence in this movie, but it doesn't overwhelm the rest of the story (and it passes the grip test, though I wasn't as completely blown away by it as most reviewers seem to be). The incomparable Ian McKellen, alas, doesn't have much to do as Gandalf the White; instead, it's Viggo Mortensen's turn to flesh out Aragorn, and he does so with great panache. The script places him in an odd position by choosing to leave his status as Heir of Isildur dormant; he begins to step up as a commander, but one wonders why the Rohirrim let him do it. In a medieval milieu, competence counts for a lot, but lineage counts for more, and Theoden does indeed dress him down for presumption at one point. The competence is nicely rendered, and not just on the battlefield; I liked Aragorn's conversation with Eowyn after the sword bit, and really liked his moment encouraging the boy-sent-to-do-a-man's-job at Helm's Deep. Legolas and Gimli also get to strut their stuff as warriors: we are afforded a too-brief glimpse of their orc-killing game, and Legolas's physically impossible maneuver onto a horse got an enormous round of applause from the audience. Legolas does have one moment unpleasantly reminiscent of The Squabble of Elrond from the previous movie, and Gimli's role as comic relief has an unforgiveable tendency to slide off into Jar-jar-land (although I actually like the return of the dwarf-tossing joke), but those are quibbles, really.
Merry and Pippin spend most of the movie in a holding pattern in Fangorn after their scenes with the Orcs, which I enjoyed both for the inability of the Orcs to stay organized under pressure ("Meat's back on the menu!") and the reference to the Old Forest. This plot strand is the most compressed of the bunch, but anything that minimizes the role of the Ents is, unhappily, welcome. I wasn't expecting them to be so, but the Ents were the most problematic aspect of the movie for me. Treebeard and his colleagues are reasonably well-realized effects -- not as well-realized as Gollum, but I have no quarrel with WETA's priorities there. Nor do I have much quarrel with the editing priorities that diminishes their screen time (although it would be nice to see more of Pippin and Merry on the extended DVD). I do object, strongly, to scripting Treebeard as an idiot, an isolationist unaware of what's going on in his demesne even though he's in contact with "the White Wizard". (A pointless scene in itself with no payoff for the rest of the plot, BTW.) I object to making the storming of Isengard a "hasty" decision rather than the considered choice of the Entmoot -- I cannot fathom what dramatic problem the script thinks it's solving by employing this cliche. I object with almost a text-purist's ire to the loss of the back end of Treebeard's "sad, but not unhappy" evaluation that, though the Ents may be marching to their doom at Isengard, doom would find them just as surely if they did nothing. Jackson and Co. have missed the point here as thoroughly as they did with the Mirror of Galadriel in the first film, and it's a crying shame.
On the other hand, Ring-quest holds up very well, even truncated as it must be. They got in the stewed rabbits and the oliphaunts and a jeopardy sequence at the Black Gate of Mordor that, like the falling staircase in Moria, doesn't really make sense but is great fun to watch, and includes a brief glimpse of the determination which both Frodo and Sam are bringing to bear on their situation. Sean Astin as Sam has really stepped up to the plate in this movie; everything he does, from his amazement over the oliphaunts to his dislike of Gollum to his truculence with Faramir to his loyalty to Frodo, is just spot on. (He even almost manages to pull off the speech the scriptwriters give him in Osgiliath, but the rhetoric collapses under its own banality -- another place where I become something of a text purist. When Tolkien says it better, leave the text alone!) Elijah Wood as Frodo begins competently to lose it under the weight of his burden; I was most chilled, however, not by any of his larger set pieces, but by the very short scene in which Frodo lies awake toying with the Ring. Eep.
Character moments generally take a back seat to action this round, but fortunately don't get tossed out of the vehicle entirely. Andy Serkis's Gollum gets the lion's share of them, of course -- a more clinically psychotic Gollum than the book presents. It's fascinating to watch him (he looked like an effect to me for the first scene or two, and then my eye adjusted and he just looked like himself), but I'm not sure that Serkis's performance doesn't smooth out the ambiguities in Gollum by splitting his personae so firmly through most of the film. Rather than the "truce and a temporary alliance" between Slinker and Stinker (as Sam perceives Gollum's selves in the book) to protect the Ring from Sauron, we get the temporary banishment of Gollum by an unexpectedly childlike Smeagol, who chooses to trust Frodo to protect him rather than his old alter ego. (Somebody on the script team has read the same books about MPD as I have. :-) I enjoyed watching Gollum's reemergence during Faramir's interrogation of him at Henneth Annun (a change to which I do not object, because it gets over the awkward revelation of Frodo's errand by Sam in the text, and because both Serkis and David Wenham as Faramir hit the right notes in their performances), but I preferred the slight back-and-forth shifts of the scene before the Black Gate, where Gollum's unexpressed need for the Ring shades his expressed desire to keep Frodo from being captured. I dearly hope that they will leave Gollum his moment of near-repentance in ROTK; his interactions with Sam (the "fat hobbit" who "watches all the time") look to be setting it up, but then I thought Gandalf's "pity and mercy" speech was setting up Frodo's decision to spare Gollum and they slid right over that. (Argh!)
The royal family of Rohan gets its introduction in this film, and I must say that their first scene together is one of my favorites. It's a shame that Karl Urban's Eomer gets so little screen time, although the plot alteration that takes him out of the picture after the first hour and has Gandalf bring him, rather than the otherwise invisible Erkenbrand, to save the day at Helm's Deep is a reasonable dramatic decision. The script's interpretation of Theoden's character likewise drives the plot to Helm's Deep rather differently than the book does, but without raising my hackles. I could have done without his "For death or glory" line, but otherwise I thought Bernard Hill got across Theoden's virtues and limitations rather well. Brad Dourif as Grima Wormtongue, in his scene with Miranda Otto's Eowyn at her cousin Theodred's deathbed, manages to make you understand why he's become the power behind the throne in spite of a makeup job that screams, "I'm a villain! Don't trust me!" And Otto herself is marvelous, simply marvelous, even though most of what she's doing is merely set-up for the real drama in ROTK. ("Where will wants not, a way opens, so we say, and so I have found myself ... Call me Dernhelm.")
The script has built up something like a love triangle among her and Aragorn and Arwen which I am not altogether certain works -- not on Eowyn's side (you can see her mentally taking two steps forward and one step back when she looks at Aragorn, trying to figure him out), but on Arwen's. When we left Aragorn and Arwen in the first film, they seemed to have what the Victorians would have called "an understanding." In TTT, we are suddenly faced with a flashback to Elrond playing the heavy Victorian father (somewhere on Tol Eressea, a defamation of character lawsuit is being prepared ;-), Aragorn telling Arwen he can't marry her, and Arwen potentially heading for the Grey Havens (although from my understanding of what's been dropped on the floor, she actually ends up in Lothlorien). I'm told that some of this becomes clearer if you've seen the extended DVD of FOTR, which I haven't done yet. (On a personal note, I found the conversation between Elrond and Arwen, apart the lovely flash-forward to Aragorn's death, annoying to watch because my dissertation-clotted brain kept reading it as quasi-incestuous. And then he tries to send her off in a boat! Argh! But that shouldn't bother the rest of you. :-). I suspect that somewhere in here we're setting up for Arwen to deliver the reforged Narsil to Aragorn while Eowyn is there to watch, despair of ever getting out of Rohan, and decide to seek glory and death on the Pelennor Fields. (Where there had better not be any Elves, other than Legolas, or I shall throw popcorn at the screen.)
David Wenham's Faramir is not the Faramir of the book, but I suspect I would find this less of a problem if he had more time on-stage. His intial scenes sketch him in as a competent commander, intelligent and not averse to fencing for information rather than strong-arming it out (I enjoy the "tell me another one" expression he throws Frodo in their argument over where Gollum is, and also the way he handles Frodo at the Forbidden Pool), and troubled by his brother's death. And yet ... and yet ... If this movie has one, overarching problem, it's follow-through. Almost every story-strand begins well, but then starts to wobble as the demand to keep the film under three hours requires that the editors shave away not only extraneous matter, but important information. How does Faramir know about his brother's death? Why is it important to him to be able to show his quality? (Even Galadriel's intrusive plot-catchup voiceover doesn't explain that.) Perhaps the extended DVD will answer these questions; I hope so.
Meanwhile, Faramir's character arc is stupidly foreshortened by the inexplicable decision to haul everyone to Osgiliath for a moderately pointless action sequence -- it does establish that Gondor is in deep trouble, but a more bloody skirmish in Ithilien and some well-placed comments over the map could have done that. (Speaking of which, I bang my head against the script logic that shows you a map of Middle-earth and then tells you that a) scouts *from Ithilien* have word of what's going on in Rohan, 150-plus miles off; and that b) Orcs hold the eastern side of Osgiliath, but not only does Faramir's company have no trouble getting through their lines [all right, they could have crossed the Anduin further north at Cair Andros], but Frodo, Sam and Gollum appear to have no trouble getting back across the River into Ithilien from the middle of a battle zone. Ye gods!) I would have preferred a more claustrophobic confrontation between Frodo and Faramir over the Ring in Henneth Annun, by contrast to the enormous sound and fury of Helm's Deep -- in general, I thought that the Ring was revealed far too publically in and around Osgiliath, even leaving aside the confrontation with the flying Nazgul (which Sauron would have to be pretty darned distracted to miss). Still, I find that I'm withholding judgment on Faramir until after I see what happens to him in ROTK; what little Wenham had to do here seems promising.
I don't want to leave you thinking I didn't like this movie. I did, quite a bit. The cinematography is gorgeous and the splendid production design leads me to wonder whether Richard Taylor is really Celebrimbor returned and WETA Workshops a covert reconstitution of the Gwaith-i-Mirdain. :-) The ensemble, once again, deserves enormous credit for doing what one critic last year called "very clever work under what must have been strange conditions." The film editors deserve an Oscar nomination for their Herculean effort in pulling this monster together in a way that holds attention from first to last. The script frequently makes the right choices in adapting a difficult text; it survives some near-mortal missteps by remaining for the most part true to its own logic. (Apart the business with the map.) The visual and aural impact of the spectacle also covers a multitude of sins. Peter Jackson is a very talented director and an utter lunatic, which is the only combination that could possibly pull this production off. And whaddaya mean, I have to wait until 12/17/03 to find out what happens next?! ARGH!
Short take (no spoilers):
Wow. Argh. Wow. Argh. Wow. Argh. Wow. Argh. Wow. Argh ...
Long take (spoilers ho, both for _The Two Towers_ and, prospectively, for Return of the King):
I enjoyed this movie, with reservations.
I am not a text purist, but having read LOTR so many times, I can't help watching the film as an adaptation of the book. I'm immediately aware of deviations from and rearrangements of the narrative; what keeps me from being a text purist is that I don't reflexively object to them. :-) As an adaptation, TTT is less strong than FOTR not because it plays fast and loose with the text, but because the changes it chooses to make do not always serve the story well. And (as Tolkien once remarked of the book), the film is too short.
More so than when watching FOTR, I had the feeling that TTT was cramming four hours of plot into three hours of moviegoing. It's obvious from the trailers that a lot of scenes were left on the cutting-room floor; in particular, the background to Haldir's Elvish contingent arriving at Helm's Deep was conspicuous by its absence. (My objection to having Elves, other than Legolas, in Rohan probably goes without saying by now. Mind you, though, they are fun to watch dicing up orcs, and Howard Shore's rewriting of the Lothlorien theme as a march is a delight to hear.) The need to cut back and forth between four plot strands -- two major (Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli in Rohan / Frodo, Sam and Gollum on the way to Mordor), one minor (Merry and Pippin and the Ents), and a mini (Arwen, Aragorn and Elrond), none of which intersect -- makes the film an editor's nightmare, almost unavoidably choppy. This problem is most apparent during the first twenty minutes, when everyone's story is being established; thereafter the editing team does a commendable job minimizing it. Despite the occasional abrupt shift, I seldom felt that I was being hurried from one locale to the next. The exceedingly difficult transitions between Rohan and Rivendell were especially well-handled, not just editorially but also musically and by the actors.
My chief worry going in, that the Ring-quest would get short shrift in favor of the War in the West, turned out to be unfounded. Helm's Deep is clearly the money sequence in this movie, but it doesn't overwhelm the rest of the story (and it passes the grip test, though I wasn't as completely blown away by it as most reviewers seem to be). The incomparable Ian McKellen, alas, doesn't have much to do as Gandalf the White; instead, it's Viggo Mortensen's turn to flesh out Aragorn, and he does so with great panache. The script places him in an odd position by choosing to leave his status as Heir of Isildur dormant; he begins to step up as a commander, but one wonders why the Rohirrim let him do it. In a medieval milieu, competence counts for a lot, but lineage counts for more, and Theoden does indeed dress him down for presumption at one point. The competence is nicely rendered, and not just on the battlefield; I liked Aragorn's conversation with Eowyn after the sword bit, and really liked his moment encouraging the boy-sent-to-do-a-man's-job at Helm's Deep. Legolas and Gimli also get to strut their stuff as warriors: we are afforded a too-brief glimpse of their orc-killing game, and Legolas's physically impossible maneuver onto a horse got an enormous round of applause from the audience. Legolas does have one moment unpleasantly reminiscent of The Squabble of Elrond from the previous movie, and Gimli's role as comic relief has an unforgiveable tendency to slide off into Jar-jar-land (although I actually like the return of the dwarf-tossing joke), but those are quibbles, really.
Merry and Pippin spend most of the movie in a holding pattern in Fangorn after their scenes with the Orcs, which I enjoyed both for the inability of the Orcs to stay organized under pressure ("Meat's back on the menu!") and the reference to the Old Forest. This plot strand is the most compressed of the bunch, but anything that minimizes the role of the Ents is, unhappily, welcome. I wasn't expecting them to be so, but the Ents were the most problematic aspect of the movie for me. Treebeard and his colleagues are reasonably well-realized effects -- not as well-realized as Gollum, but I have no quarrel with WETA's priorities there. Nor do I have much quarrel with the editing priorities that diminishes their screen time (although it would be nice to see more of Pippin and Merry on the extended DVD). I do object, strongly, to scripting Treebeard as an idiot, an isolationist unaware of what's going on in his demesne even though he's in contact with "the White Wizard". (A pointless scene in itself with no payoff for the rest of the plot, BTW.) I object to making the storming of Isengard a "hasty" decision rather than the considered choice of the Entmoot -- I cannot fathom what dramatic problem the script thinks it's solving by employing this cliche. I object with almost a text-purist's ire to the loss of the back end of Treebeard's "sad, but not unhappy" evaluation that, though the Ents may be marching to their doom at Isengard, doom would find them just as surely if they did nothing. Jackson and Co. have missed the point here as thoroughly as they did with the Mirror of Galadriel in the first film, and it's a crying shame.
On the other hand, Ring-quest holds up very well, even truncated as it must be. They got in the stewed rabbits and the oliphaunts and a jeopardy sequence at the Black Gate of Mordor that, like the falling staircase in Moria, doesn't really make sense but is great fun to watch, and includes a brief glimpse of the determination which both Frodo and Sam are bringing to bear on their situation. Sean Astin as Sam has really stepped up to the plate in this movie; everything he does, from his amazement over the oliphaunts to his dislike of Gollum to his truculence with Faramir to his loyalty to Frodo, is just spot on. (He even almost manages to pull off the speech the scriptwriters give him in Osgiliath, but the rhetoric collapses under its own banality -- another place where I become something of a text purist. When Tolkien says it better, leave the text alone!) Elijah Wood as Frodo begins competently to lose it under the weight of his burden; I was most chilled, however, not by any of his larger set pieces, but by the very short scene in which Frodo lies awake toying with the Ring. Eep.
Character moments generally take a back seat to action this round, but fortunately don't get tossed out of the vehicle entirely. Andy Serkis's Gollum gets the lion's share of them, of course -- a more clinically psychotic Gollum than the book presents. It's fascinating to watch him (he looked like an effect to me for the first scene or two, and then my eye adjusted and he just looked like himself), but I'm not sure that Serkis's performance doesn't smooth out the ambiguities in Gollum by splitting his personae so firmly through most of the film. Rather than the "truce and a temporary alliance" between Slinker and Stinker (as Sam perceives Gollum's selves in the book) to protect the Ring from Sauron, we get the temporary banishment of Gollum by an unexpectedly childlike Smeagol, who chooses to trust Frodo to protect him rather than his old alter ego. (Somebody on the script team has read the same books about MPD as I have. :-) I enjoyed watching Gollum's reemergence during Faramir's interrogation of him at Henneth Annun (a change to which I do not object, because it gets over the awkward revelation of Frodo's errand by Sam in the text, and because both Serkis and David Wenham as Faramir hit the right notes in their performances), but I preferred the slight back-and-forth shifts of the scene before the Black Gate, where Gollum's unexpressed need for the Ring shades his expressed desire to keep Frodo from being captured. I dearly hope that they will leave Gollum his moment of near-repentance in ROTK; his interactions with Sam (the "fat hobbit" who "watches all the time") look to be setting it up, but then I thought Gandalf's "pity and mercy" speech was setting up Frodo's decision to spare Gollum and they slid right over that. (Argh!)
The royal family of Rohan gets its introduction in this film, and I must say that their first scene together is one of my favorites. It's a shame that Karl Urban's Eomer gets so little screen time, although the plot alteration that takes him out of the picture after the first hour and has Gandalf bring him, rather than the otherwise invisible Erkenbrand, to save the day at Helm's Deep is a reasonable dramatic decision. The script's interpretation of Theoden's character likewise drives the plot to Helm's Deep rather differently than the book does, but without raising my hackles. I could have done without his "For death or glory" line, but otherwise I thought Bernard Hill got across Theoden's virtues and limitations rather well. Brad Dourif as Grima Wormtongue, in his scene with Miranda Otto's Eowyn at her cousin Theodred's deathbed, manages to make you understand why he's become the power behind the throne in spite of a makeup job that screams, "I'm a villain! Don't trust me!" And Otto herself is marvelous, simply marvelous, even though most of what she's doing is merely set-up for the real drama in ROTK. ("Where will wants not, a way opens, so we say, and so I have found myself ... Call me Dernhelm.")
The script has built up something like a love triangle among her and Aragorn and Arwen which I am not altogether certain works -- not on Eowyn's side (you can see her mentally taking two steps forward and one step back when she looks at Aragorn, trying to figure him out), but on Arwen's. When we left Aragorn and Arwen in the first film, they seemed to have what the Victorians would have called "an understanding." In TTT, we are suddenly faced with a flashback to Elrond playing the heavy Victorian father (somewhere on Tol Eressea, a defamation of character lawsuit is being prepared ;-), Aragorn telling Arwen he can't marry her, and Arwen potentially heading for the Grey Havens (although from my understanding of what's been dropped on the floor, she actually ends up in Lothlorien). I'm told that some of this becomes clearer if you've seen the extended DVD of FOTR, which I haven't done yet. (On a personal note, I found the conversation between Elrond and Arwen, apart the lovely flash-forward to Aragorn's death, annoying to watch because my dissertation-clotted brain kept reading it as quasi-incestuous. And then he tries to send her off in a boat! Argh! But that shouldn't bother the rest of you. :-). I suspect that somewhere in here we're setting up for Arwen to deliver the reforged Narsil to Aragorn while Eowyn is there to watch, despair of ever getting out of Rohan, and decide to seek glory and death on the Pelennor Fields. (Where there had better not be any Elves, other than Legolas, or I shall throw popcorn at the screen.)
David Wenham's Faramir is not the Faramir of the book, but I suspect I would find this less of a problem if he had more time on-stage. His intial scenes sketch him in as a competent commander, intelligent and not averse to fencing for information rather than strong-arming it out (I enjoy the "tell me another one" expression he throws Frodo in their argument over where Gollum is, and also the way he handles Frodo at the Forbidden Pool), and troubled by his brother's death. And yet ... and yet ... If this movie has one, overarching problem, it's follow-through. Almost every story-strand begins well, but then starts to wobble as the demand to keep the film under three hours requires that the editors shave away not only extraneous matter, but important information. How does Faramir know about his brother's death? Why is it important to him to be able to show his quality? (Even Galadriel's intrusive plot-catchup voiceover doesn't explain that.) Perhaps the extended DVD will answer these questions; I hope so.
Meanwhile, Faramir's character arc is stupidly foreshortened by the inexplicable decision to haul everyone to Osgiliath for a moderately pointless action sequence -- it does establish that Gondor is in deep trouble, but a more bloody skirmish in Ithilien and some well-placed comments over the map could have done that. (Speaking of which, I bang my head against the script logic that shows you a map of Middle-earth and then tells you that a) scouts *from Ithilien* have word of what's going on in Rohan, 150-plus miles off; and that b) Orcs hold the eastern side of Osgiliath, but not only does Faramir's company have no trouble getting through their lines [all right, they could have crossed the Anduin further north at Cair Andros], but Frodo, Sam and Gollum appear to have no trouble getting back across the River into Ithilien from the middle of a battle zone. Ye gods!) I would have preferred a more claustrophobic confrontation between Frodo and Faramir over the Ring in Henneth Annun, by contrast to the enormous sound and fury of Helm's Deep -- in general, I thought that the Ring was revealed far too publically in and around Osgiliath, even leaving aside the confrontation with the flying Nazgul (which Sauron would have to be pretty darned distracted to miss). Still, I find that I'm withholding judgment on Faramir until after I see what happens to him in ROTK; what little Wenham had to do here seems promising.
I don't want to leave you thinking I didn't like this movie. I did, quite a bit. The cinematography is gorgeous and the splendid production design leads me to wonder whether Richard Taylor is really Celebrimbor returned and WETA Workshops a covert reconstitution of the Gwaith-i-Mirdain. :-) The ensemble, once again, deserves enormous credit for doing what one critic last year called "very clever work under what must have been strange conditions." The film editors deserve an Oscar nomination for their Herculean effort in pulling this monster together in a way that holds attention from first to last. The script frequently makes the right choices in adapting a difficult text; it survives some near-mortal missteps by remaining for the most part true to its own logic. (Apart the business with the map.) The visual and aural impact of the spectacle also covers a multitude of sins. Peter Jackson is a very talented director and an utter lunatic, which is the only combination that could possibly pull this production off. And whaddaya mean, I have to wait until 12/17/03 to find out what happens next?! ARGH!