Posted on 12/18/2002 8:09:34 AM PST by ZeitgeistSurfer
Next to me during the preview screening of “The Two Towers” was a teenage boy with prosthetic Hobbit ears. Sitting on my bookshelf is a copy of “The Lord of the Rings,” bookmarked at page 128. It is considerably easier to cross Fangorn Forest than the gulf between Tolkien cultists and those of us who abandoned the quest, put off by its epic struggle between the rousing and the grindingly dull.
Hark! The red sun rises: blood has been spilled this night. “Grindingly dull” forsooth! Ring a ding dillo, or whatever. Before you notch an arrow into your mighty quiver, o worthy cultist, rest assured that Peter Jackson’s latest installment delivers to the faithful.
So feel free to toss me aside, mount thy trusty yellow cab, and brave the imposing concrete wilds of midtown to hear once more of the amazing adventures of Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood) and Samwise Gamgee (Sean Austin), Pippin (Billy Boyd) and Merry (Dominic Monaghan), Gandalf (Ian McKellan), Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), Gimli the Dwarf (John Rhys-Davies), and Legolas the Elf (Orlando Bloom). Ring a ding dillo del! Derry del, my hearties! Ho hum.
One Ring to stun them all — but in the darkness bore them.
“The Two Towers” (PG-13, 179 mins.) picks up right where “Fellowship” left off. As the evil wizard Saruman (Christopher Lee) gathers his army of nefarious, dentally challenged Orcs, Frodo and Sam journey toward Mordor, determined to annihilate the ring of power before it falls into the hands of Sauron, the baddest man in all of Middle Earth.
Along the way they’re met by Gollum, the ring’s previous keeper, who’s tortured by covetous hysteria. An uneasy relationship forms as Gollum, a digital creation burdened by the only engaging psychology in the picture, guides the Hobbits toward the Black Gates of Mordor, all the while keeping one bugged-out eye on his “preciousssssss.”
Meanwhile, a pack of heroes led by Aragorn are pursuing a bunch of ghouls who’ve absconded with Pippin and Merry. The young Hobitts escape from their captors into Fangorn Forest, get scooped up by a ponderous tree spirit, and spend the rest of the picture doing very little besides acting twee.
Aragorn & Co. gallop all over the place, decapitate here and there, intone a fair amount of straight-faced grandiloquence, then forge an alliance with King Theoden of Rohan (Bernard Hill), whose empire is threatened by the dark army of Saruman.
I’ll not waste your time quibbling about the haphazard narrative pacing, which comes to a dead halt so we can watch Big Walking Tree Thing lumber along with his Hobbit cargo. Nor dwell on the fact that Frodo looks stoned and confused throughout the whole movie, and that I couldn’t care less what his problem is.
It is of little significance that Mr. Davies plays the dwarf for laughs and gets none. Only a persnickety critic would complain that the women in this film are negligible distractions from the multi-species ass-kicking. And if there’s a good 45 minutes halfway through during which you may feel free to step out for a spot of lunch, well … who cares?
The believers will gobble it up and pant for “The Return of the King.” For the rest of us, bring on the spectacle! Darker and tougher than “The Fellowship of the Ring,” this sequel is an enormous — enormous — cathedral of a film, a splendidly vertical epic.
It doesn’t pause for a breathtaking landscape moment. The entire film is one non-stop soaring, plunging, head-rush of landscape. The helicopter budget must have cost more than Sir Ian McKellen. When anyone takes the slightest step, the sky quadruples and infinite plains unfurl at the foot of a gargantuan mountain ranges. Under cinematographer Andrew Lesnie’s gigantic lens, the wondrous geography of New Zealand is transformed into a wholly believable Middle Earth.
More amazing than all this beauty is the manner in which it is destroyed, hooray! The astonishing climactic siege on the Rohan fortress Helm’s Deep by a swarm of digital evil is a new classic of cinematic mayhem. Fueled by maniacal glee, it’s a stunning sequence, packed with detail and brilliantly staged, with a clear sense of who’s maiming whom.
I may not have cared a fig for the story, but almost every setpiece packs a wallop, and the bestiary is just fantastic; gargantuan elephants, bristling super-jackals, vicious dragons, wave upon wave of those tar-dunked, razor-toothed, loathsome Orcs.
Too bad everything else bored me to tears. I can’t fault the all-around magnificent work of Mr. Jackson and his crew. Armed with a commendable lack of irony, much computer processing-power, and a large sum of money, they’ve mounted their epic with great respect for the source material. Alas, what is tedious in the movie can largely be traced to the book. Or what is magical in the movie can largely be traced to the book. Whichever. “The Two Towers” defies all criticism. I’ve barely even discussed one of the towers.
All right, I confess: I’m not completely immune to Hobbitry. When Gandalf arrives on screen in his grey cashmere muumuu, twitching his nose and twirling his staff, for one brief moment I considered altering the shape of my ears. Merry yellow berry-o!
Clearly, if I want to find out about something other than Nathan Lee, I should turn to someone fit for the job.
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