Ian McKellen as Gandalf in Lord of the Rings: the Two Towers
Posted on 12/12/2002 10:56:40 AM PST by Texas2step
Worse and worse and much much better
Xan Brooks
Wednesday December 11, 2002
|
Ian McKellen as Gandalf in Lord of the Rings: the Two Towers |
Worse, presumably, is when Gandalf (Ian McKellen) nose-dives into the bowels of the earth during the movie's opening seconds (astride a balrog, no less). Worser still arrives when Frodo (Elijah Wood) starts to succumb to the lure of the One Ring while navigating his way to Mordor. And worsest, no doubt, is when the corrupted Saruman (Christopher Lee) unleashes an army of 10,000 orcs on the 300 besieged men, women and children at a remote mountain fortress. From first to last, The Two Towers is nasty, brutish and long (it clocks in at over three hours). It bows out to a vista of belching lava and swooping Nazgul, with barely a crumb of comfort to be found.
But don't let that scare you off. Because The Two Towers is also mightily entertaining; a confident, sure-footed epic that works a kind of alchemy on its cod-grandiose material. Shorn of the apple-cheeked hobbit antics that infested the first film, it's an altogether darker, more relentless outing; fracturing the simple trajectory of the first chapter to dart back and forth between three parallel storylines.
In the first (and chief) of these, Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) and the resurrected Gandalf attempt to convince a tottering and enfeebled king (Bernard Hill) to marshall his forces against the rampant Saruman. Meanwhile, Frodo and Sam (Sean Astin) find themselves guided along their increasingly treacherous route by Gollum, an untrustworthy skin-and-bone sneak who desperately longs to reclaim the ring as his own. And in the third (and by far the least interesting) strand, fellow hobbits Merry and Pippin (Dominic Monaghan, Billy Boyd) are abducted by a walking, talking tree spirit who looks as though he's just lumbered out of an Arthur Rackham illustration.
Along the way, Jackson takes the time to introduce and flesh out a gallery of Tolkien's supporting players. And yet while the likes of Faramir (David Wenham), Eowyn (Miranda Otto) and Grima Wormtongue (Brad Dourif) all make for welcome new additions, they find themselves muscled into the shade by Gollum; a masterly blend of state-of-the-art CGI and expert voice work by Andy Serkis. Until now, the CGI inhabitants of live action movies have registered as little more than sketchy phantoms; superimposed onto a landscape they never quite connected to. Gollum, by contrast, rings out as big as life. He's a tortured, tragic, utterly believable character; a pallid junkie adrift in fairyland.
Elsewhere, Jackson throws in a love triangle (with Aragorn torn between mortal Eowyn and the immortal Arwen), a bunch of cackling orcs (replete with post-war East End diction) and swooping helicopter shots over the snow-clad mountains of Middle Earth (actually New Zealand in disguise). Its three-hour running time flags mildly during the tree-hugging interludes, the thunderous final battle scene perhaps beats you over the head for a few minutes longer than is strictly necessary, and Legolas - frankly - is a self-satisfied bore. But in all other respects, The Two Towers stands as a majestic second instalment: a saga of pace and weight that runs on a kind of demented, wing-and-a-prayer ambition. In going from worse to worse, The Lord of the Rings trilogy just got even better.
Thanks! - I think our side will win!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.