 Ring Ping!! |
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.
Ring Ping!! |
Most of the rest of this review appears to be sour grapes at artistic decisions to make TT fit into a different medium. People can quibble about Peter Jackson's decisions on the latter, but he had to make them.
He could have portrayed the Ent's decisions, and Treebeard, differently within the same time limit. Ditto for Faramir.
I hadn't caught the new writer. That might be the reason for so many wrong decisions in TT as opposed to FOTR.
Thought I might post the letter I fired off to Eberhart this evening.
---
Hello John,
Though you have no doubt received some correspondence on the subject already, I feel compelled - as a fellow Tolkien fanatic (and Star grunt) - to toss in a few comments of my own in regards to your column Sunday (December 22, 2002) in the Arts section entitled, "`The Two Towers' fails to follow best instincts of Tolkien's trilogy."
Having been deeply immersed in all things Tolkien since my early teens, I feel every single deviation from the books by Jackson's trilogy keenly. It has necessitated some real effort to detach myself to give myself a reasonable chance to enjoy the movies. The moment that it became apparent that the Crickhollow scheme had been tossed aside on my first viewing of FOTR, I was off my stride. Having said that, I have to say: don't get carried away here.
As I understand it, your objections to the liberties taken by Peter Jackson in The Two Towers amount essentially to this:
1) The confrontation between Gandalf and Saruman at Isengard has been either deleted or moved back to The Return of the King.
2) The Ents only march on Isengard because the Hobbits goad them into it.
And further: that Jackson must have made these (and other?) changes for crass commercial reasons.
In regards to the first: I think Jackson's decision to defer the confrontation is defensible, perhaps even preferable. Mainly this is due to the nature of the film media vs. that of the book. A great deal more compression is needed to convey story arcs on the screen, and a filmmaker does not have the luxury that an author does with narrative exposition to explain background, character, and motivations. More important even than that, however, is the difficulty of story climax. And in regards to the Aragorn-Legolas-Gimli story arc, the key climax - indeed, of the whole movie - was the Battle of Helm's Deep. Given that, any further dragging out of the arc after the battle risked a serious letdown. Filming "The Voice of Saruman" in even the briefest fashion risked making it seriously anti-climactic, no matter how well it might be scripted. It also risks diminishing the power of Helm's Deep, as surely as Viggo's retracing of the Hobbits' escape had me half expecting him to blurt out, a la Prince Humperdink, "Iocaine powder - I'd bet my life on it!"
In the book Tolkien marinates in the slow steady (and wonderful) progression of the story arc for a full four chapters after Helm's Deep ("The Road to Isengard," "Flotsam and Jetsam," "The Voice of Saruman" and "The Palantir"). Even allowing for severe compression you're still talking about some serious extension of the story arc, which adds in the difficulty as well of scrounging up the needed screen time to convey it while adhering to New Line's three hour diktat. Tolkien had no time limits, or the need to structure his climax at the end of each book, especially given that he really viewed it as one long epic divided into six books. Nor did he need bother with intercutting the story arcs, as Jackson was more or less compelled to do.
It is a bit of a disappointment not to wrap up the Saruman storyline before diving into the action in Return of the King (to say nothing of missing the wonderful cliffhanger possibilities in the Shelob confrontation), but it's just hard for me to see how either could have been incorporated into The Two Towers without introducing too many climactic moments into the movie and also ratcheting the running time well over three hours. Even if we whack some of Jackson's "embellishments."
In regards to the second: Jackson's liberty with the Ents seems on reflection a much more minor tweak to the story than it appears at first glance.
Certainly in the book the Ents decide at the Entmoot to go to war. Jackson has them deciding against it, which no doubt threw every purist in the audience into an initial tizzy. I know I was spewing popcorn.
Yet what is clear is that either way, Merry and Pippin were responsible for the decision taking place - at least in the time and place and fashion that it happened. Tolkien leaves absolutely no doubt about this during Gandalf's talk with the Three Hunters in "The White Rider" chapter:
...They were brought to Fangorn, and their coming was like the falling of small stones that starts an avalanche in the mountains. Even as we talk here, I hear the first rumblings.
...Saruman also had a mind to capture the Ring for himself, or at least to snare some hobbits for his evil purposes.So between them our enemies have contrived only to bing Merry and Pippin with marvelous speed, and in the nick of time, to Fangorn, where otherwise they would never have come at all!
...and Fangorn himself, he is perilous too; yet he is wise and kindly nonetheless. But now his long slow wrath is brimming over, and all the forest is filled with it. The coming of the hobbits and the tidings that they have brought have spilled it; it will soon be running like a flood; but its tide is turned against Saruman and the axes of Isengard.
What Jackson does is another bit of compression. The destruction of so many trees near Nan Curunir is a proximate cause of Treebeard's wrath in both book and movie; in the book he is already aware of and very angry about the destruction, but what he does not know, until the hobbits give him further ntelligence, is how much Saruman is behind it all. Conveying all that on screen as Tolkien did (through expository dialogue) could be done but it would take more time, and it would also be more tedious. Jackson moves Treebeard's learning of the destruction back by way of Pippin's gentle trick, which adds visceral impact to the decision and his anger.
Would I have done it this way? Honestly I don't think I would have thought to do so. But perhaps I would have made a less compelling movie than Jackson has as a result. I confess I'm dying to hear Jackson et al's commentary on these decisions when the DVD comes out.
As to the question of motivations: I can't really speak to that. Save to say that I have to think that commcerial motivations would be (I think) if anything of greater import in making the first film, when the stakes were so high and Jackson's work so unproven. I find it hard to believe that he didn't have greater creative flexibility on the subsequent movies once the blockbuster status of the first was assured. Of course one might argue that he merely felt more flexibility to annoy the purists. If so I'll have to lay his brew under an enchantment of surpassing flatness for seven years.
So in retrospect I think these moves that bother you are at least defensible. My quibbles (once I recovered from my shock) were smaller, the chief of which were: the decision to cast Faramir as a kind of Boromir Lite, determined to take Frodo back to Gondor until a sudden conversion after hearing Sam's speech; and the suggestion that rushing to Helm's Deep was an unwitting trap on Theoden's part, rather than the shrewd strategic move suggested by Gandalf in light of the Mark's inability to fully muster its troops for a field battle in time. In regards to the first I actually enjoyed the diversion to Osgiliath, given that it gave me a look at the wonderful ruins sets of Gondor's long-abandoned capital, as well as the opening stages of Sauron's assault - but I would rather have seen Faramir at least evidence some signs of inner turmoil over what to do with the Ring. It would have made his character more fleshed out as well as make his ultimate decision more credible.
But those are nitpicks. Even given that this is just one man's (or three/four writers?) distillation of the tale, it is hard to argue that Jackson has done fundamental violence to the essence of the story so far. I'll add as well that some of this thought (as with the first movie) has blossomed on a second viewing. None of it detracts like I feared it would from what is by most measures an astounding achievement.
"So far." I had better knock on wood just to be safe.
Best holiday wishes to you and yours.
Best regards, --
And isn't it a shame? It didn't have to be that way. I've got a FReeper who's mad at me beacuse I've poked some fun at the film. Sam's speech at the end really got to him and my fun is tearing down the movie. Jackson and Co. have decided to trim out and re-invent all sorts of things that sincere fans of the book love and, well, we "purists" just have to accept that we're not going to get that.
I think it's pretty raw that after acceptinging cut out segments, doubled characters, line switches, and whole-cloth fabrications, we must now also accept smart characters being stupid and good characters being bad.
It doesn't matter if Faramir seems like a meany, it only matters that he captures Frodo then breaks the laws of the land to let him continue his quest. Tolkien told the story one way, Jackson told it another, but the basic story is the same.
The Ents meet Merry and Pippin, have an Ent-moot, and decide to attack Isengard. Tolkien tells it one way, Jackson another.
Theoden heads to Helms Deep, Saruman traps him there, the armies of Saruman breach the ancient fortress, the men of Rohan fight bravely, they are rescued at dawn by forces unlooked for. Tolkien this way, Jackson that way.
Keeping the story the same but changing the details does not ruin the myth.
I liked the movie, and I know that some changes were made for time considerations, but I see no need for some of the changes.
So many will miss it? So many MORE people will know it than would have if the films had never come out. Many adults are reading it for the first time, or re-reading it after many years. And a whole new generation is reading those books now. Sales of the books are SOARING. The film sparked their interest, and they can read the books now and find how much more there truly is. The movie has shown us wonderful images of the highlights. The books do the rest.
I ask, if Jackson wants to tell his own story, why does he reach for Tolkien's Lord of the Rings to tell it?
Thanks, Varda. It's always a treat so see other FReeper's weigh in for Tolkien's defence. I can a accept a thumbnail character sketch of Tolkien's creations when time won't allow for a carefully rendered portrait. I'm sorry that Jackson decided to substitute some important portraits in Tolkien's story with crude cartoons instead.
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