Posted on 12/23/2002 5:48:39 AM PST by The Iguana
Posted on Sun, Dec. 22, 2002
`The Two Towers' fails to follow best instincts of Tolkien's trilogy
By JOHN MARK EBERHART
The Kansas City Star
When a reader walks into a cinema, he walks hand in hand with risk.
Hollywood has a spotty record in adapting books to the big screen. Anyone who saw John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany get minced up into "Simon Birch" knows what I mean.
Before this diatribe officially begins, let me be clear: I think Peter Jackson's version of "The Fellowship of the Ring" is excellent -- which makes me wonder how in Middle-earth the director went so wrong with "The Two Towers," the second part of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy.
I do not expect films to parrot books; they are different media. I have learned to deal with disappointment over missing passages; films must be concise.
But when I walked out of the cinema after viewing "The Two Towers," I walked out seething. Jackson has wronged Tolkien fans with this manipulative corruption. What's so sad is that so much of the film is good: "The Two Towers" admirably depicts the epic battles, the gloom of Mordor, the fear that goodness is being shrouded in a fog of evil.
But "The Two Towers" makes two mistakes that are nearly unforgivable.
The two wizards
Stop.
Before you read on, know this: If you haven't seen "The Two Towers," you are about to encounter a couple of spoilers.
OK...ready? One of the reasons the book version of The Two Towers works so well is that it is a tale of two wizards.
The good wizard is Gandalf, who in the first book fell in battle with a demonic Balrog. Now he has been rekindled, only to face the evil of Sauron, the Dark Lord of Mordor. Sauron is seeking to find his lost Ring of Power, which would allow him to enslave all free people and rule over Middle-earth.
The bad wizard is Saruman, who once was good like Gandalf but now has fallen under Sauron's spell. Saruman has yielded to his lust for this most magical Ring. Gandalf, though, knows that even someone as learned as Saruman cannot wield this Ring. It represents absolute power; it will poison anyone who uses it.
In the first half of the book version of The Two Towers, the pivotal passage is Gandalf's meeting with Saruman. Gandalf's forces have bested Saruman's, and now the two wizards stare each other down at Orthanc, the tower at Saruman's fortress of Isengard.
In the mighty sweep of The Lord of the Rings, no scene enraptures me more than the one in which Gandalf breaks Saruman's staff. Gandalf punishes Saruman for taking the path of least resistance. Gandalf knows the war against Sauron can seem hopeless, but he will not brook the sin of Saruman's despairing hunger for the Ring:
"He raised his hand, and spoke slowly in a clear cold voice. `Saruman, your staff is broken.' There was a crack, and the staff split asunder in Saruman's hand, and the head of it fell down at Gandalf's feet."
Now that is a staff meeting. But Jackson has left this scene out of his film!
Why? So he can put it in 2003's "The Return of the King," the concluding movie. And why do that? Because otherwise, Christopher Lee, who plays Saruman, would have almost nothing to do in Part 3.
Jackson pumped up Saruman's part in "The Fellowship of the Ring," but that was OK. There are descriptions in that book of Gandalf tussling with Saruman, though they are presented as part of a tale Gandalf tells to Frodo the hobbit.
But this?
This is crass, unrepentant movie marketing.
Some may say, "So what? Jackson will let Gandalf rebuke Saruman in the third movie. Who cares?"
I do.
Tolkien himself wasn't happy about seeing The Lord of the Rings broken up into a trilogy. He preferred it be published as one mega-novel -- too expensive at the time, though such a version is available now.
But, for good or ill, the trilogy structure has become beloved of Tolkien fans. For half a century, they have debated the merits of each book. For my part, I think The Return of the King is the weakest, The Two Towers the strongest. Maybe that's one reason Jackson is saving some of The Two Towers for later.
But it's still wrong. Jackson has removed from Installment No. 2 the greatest face-off in the entire Lord of the Rings. After all, we never really see Sauron; he is a spirit. Saruman serves as his Evil Stand-In. Now we have a movie in which Saruman's orcs are defeated, in which the treelike Ents demolish his stronghold of Isengard...yet we are expected to wait a year to see Gandalf scold him?
Preposterous.
And it's antithetical to the spirit of Tolkien's books. Whether he knew it or not, Tolkien was writing a trilogy. The Fellowship of the Ring is very much Frodo's book. The Two Towers is Gandalf's. And the third, The Return of the King, is more about Aragorn, the dusty traveler who reveals himself as worthy monarch.
But back to those Ents...
The wrong branch
One of Tolkien's strangest characters is Treebeard, an Ent. And an Ent is a kind of itchy tree that can speak, walk and herd real trees around.
Treebeard hates Saruman because Saruman directs his orcs to kill trees to feed the furnaces of Isengard's war machine.
In the book, Treebeard calls his fellow Ent to an "Entmoot." They discuss whether to battle Saruman. They conclude they will.
But in the movie, Frodo's young kinsmen, Merry and Pippin, must goad the Ents into it!
Again: Preposterous.
I suspect Jackson was trying to give Merry and Pippin -- Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd -- more to do in film two. But handing them this role in their dealings with Treebeard is a violation of Tolkien. Merry and Pippin are young, spirited hobbits; they are not supposed to "grow up" until The Return of the King.
Worse, their nudging of the Ents diminishes the tree creatures. In the book, the Ents are the oldest thing in the world. They are elementals, Earth spirits, ultimately unknowable. The scene in which Pippin shows Treebeard a stand of dead trees is hooey. Treebeard is wise; he knows his forest. He doesn't need a hobbit to show him the way.
Actors and more
Peter Jackson is a good film director. After the first movie, I was ready to crown him Tolkien's greatest contemporary champion.
But how did he display such reverence for the books in his first film and such disregard in the second? For there are other things wrong with "The Two Towers": Much more material has been added than was added to "The Fellowship of the Ring."
Maybe it was the screenwriting. The first film's screenplay was credited to three writers, including Jackson. "Towers" is credited to four. In filmdom, there's a rule: The more the writers, the more monkeyshines.
Is the new writer, Stephen Sinclair, to blame for us enduring a cheap gag about dwarf women having beards? Is he the one who decided to have Frodo not just detained in Gondor but threatened? Did he conjure the gratuitous shots of the weeping children of Rohan?
I don't know.
But I do believe Jackson himself has caved in to the forces of commerce on this film. Yes, Christopher Lee is a fine actor; his Saruman is superciliously wicked. But to put off his clash with Ian McKellen's Gandalf until the last film is a piece of grandstanding that grates upon me.
Fortunately Jackson has a chance for redemption. But "The Return of the King" had better be dynamite.
This is the age not only of the big screen but of the DVD. I suppose I could stop bleeding if, sometime in 2004, I could own all three movies on DVD and watch them as I please -- you know, view "The Two Towers," then pop in 20 minutes of "The Return of the King," then go to bed, smirking to myself that I saw 'em my way.
Yet I still feel cheated. "Towers" could have been a monumental film, not merely exciting.
That's OK, though. I have three good ways to heal myself.
They're standing on my bookcase.
To reach John Mark Eberhart, books editor, call (816) 234-4772 or send e-mail to jeberhart@kcstar.com.
As you can see he's a bit of a purist.
Later on I'll post my rebuttal.
I might not have done things as PJ did. But his decisions are defensible.
It was a danger with the first movie more than anything else.
Now that Jackson has made New Line back all its money and then some with FOTR, he has far more clout to follow his creative instincts in the remaining movies. I fail to see why he would suddenly be beholden to the money counters now if he wasn't when putting together FOTR.
Tolkien left this ambiguous, so let us do a little basic deduction. Tolkien says that Dwarves are jealous of their "rights" - ie, they are highly protective of their women and don't like to expose them to outsiders or potential rivals. He also says that Dwarf women seldom travel, and by implication, they travel in disguise as, and among, Dwarf men. In other words, Dwarf women are secluded from all other men except their husbands and relations, and when forced to travel, for reasons of secrecy and security, they travel in disguise. Disguising them as Dwarf men is a simple enough ruse to avoid undue attention from non-Dwarves.
This is just my own deduction, but I have always assumed that when forced to travel, Dwarf women went in "drag", as it were, with false beards, and thus easily passed themselves off as males to non-Dwarves. It's not that they naturally grow beards, but that they can easily disguise themselves as male Dwarves if need be, because non-Dwarves have seldom seen Dwarf women and so can't spot the disguise.
This is my own interpretation, of course. But it does not conflict with what Tolkien wrote about Dwarves.
Maybe they wear false beards when abroad? Seems to me a Dwarf without a beard would stand out.
Dís was the daughter of Thráin II. She is the only dwarf-woman named in these histories. It was said by Gimli that there are few dwarf-women, probably no more than a third of the whole people. They seldom walk abroad except at great need, They are in voice and appearance, and in garb if they must go on a journey, so like to the dwarf-men that the eyes and ears of other peoples cannot tell them apart. This has given rise to the foolish opinion among Men that there are no dwarf-women, and that the Dwarves 'grow out of stone'. It is because of the fewness of women among them that the kind of the Dwarves increases slowly, and is in peril when they have no secure dwellings. For Dwarves take only one wife or husband each in their lives, and are jealous, as in all matters of their rights. The number of dwarf-men that marry is actually less than one-third. For not all the women take husbands: some desire none; some desire one that they cannot get, and so will have no other. As for the men, very many also do not desire marriage, being engrossed in their crafts.
Maybe they wear false beards when abroad? Seems to me a Dwarf without a beard would stand out.
That is precisely what I am implying.
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