The Two Towers: A FReeper Review

Last night, I had the pleasure of attending a midnight showing of The Two Towers. What follows is my attempt at a spoiler-free review.

Of three books of the trilogy, "The Two Towers" was always my favorite - I looked forward to the movie in fevered anticipation. I decided to throw caution to the wind and go to the midnight showing; I knew I would be hurting at work today (quick nurse, my caffine IV is low!) I was very surprised to get to the theater in our small city and find it utterly packed, my friend and I were lucky to get a seat! After a few forgettable previews, the lights dimmed and it started and all chatter stopped dead. It was the best audience to watch it with - who else but fans would pack a theatre at 12:01 AM?

The film opens with a bang, and my oh my, what a bang it was! Events moved swiftly from there. We are soon then reunited with Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli, trying to rescue Merry and Pippin from the orcs. Once again, Viggo Mortensen completely embodies the character of Aragorn. Throughout the first film, he was somewhat of a cipher, the mystery man. In this film, he is The Man - you see the king growing in him as he now leads not a band of rag-tag adventurers on a desperate quest; he is leading men to war in defense of the kingdom of Rohan against the forces of the evil wizard Saruman.

And oh, what a war. This is by far much, much more action packed than the first one. From small skirmishes to the huge battle of Helm's Deep, you can feel the adrenaline just rushing through you. No other film could ever hope to top it, except maybe next year's "Return of the King."

But it is in the story of Frodo and Gollum that the real emotional heart of the film rests. The first time I saw Gollum, I noted that "hey, that's pretty good CGI." About two minutes later, I never thought of Gollum as anything other than a real, living being. Put aside all other comparisons to other CGI characters like what you'd find in the recent Star Wars or Harry Potter flicks. Gollum is not a throwaway character to showcase the latest computer technology; the technology is merely a mask that the actor Andy Serkis wears to portray Gollum. Gollum is so well written, so well acted that the technical achievement takes a distant back seat to the conflicted, evil, sad, and pitiable character.

There is so much action, so much detail to cover, that it would be easy for the film to lose its heart, and turn into just another fantasy action flick. Just when you think that the action is overwhelming, the film reminds you that the battle against evil is also a battle against temptation and despair. Good will triumph, but only if those fighting for it keep fighting no matter the odds, even if it is certain death. We are shown how the frightened men and boys stand and fight and die at Helm's Deep to protect the women and children; we are shown the frightened faces of the women and children as they know the cost their husbands, sons and brothers are paying. Time and again, the evil ring tempts Frodo toward despair, only to have him pull back from the brink. Even stalwart Legolas almost gives in to despair. Yet courage, valor, and sacrifice (as embodied in the characters of Aragorn and Sam) defeat temptation and despair. Even though the cost is great, the battle against evil can be won. It is this aspect of the film that most affected me, and sets the film apart as truly epic classic.

I am not a Tolkien purist; I realize that due to the medium of film, changes need to be made. The three-part storyline that occurs in The Two Towers guarantees that some portion of the story will get shorted - there is simply not enough time to cover it all. The storyline of Merry, Pippin and the Ents suffer the most compression, disappointing, but totally and understandably necessary. Other changes to the story were small enough that I found them insignificant. I'm sure that like the first film, some Tolkien fans will find something to gripe about. Ignore them - like the first film, The Two Towers captures the essence and soul of Tolkien.

The music score was very good, more of a continuation of the first film's score than something completely new. The film's technical achievements cannot be overstated. In my mind, I knew they made extensive use of computer generated imagery. But to my eyes, it was flawless. My brain knew that the enormous battle of Helm's Deep was created on a computer. My eyes told me that that was a lie - they'd gone out and found about 10,000 orcs and used them as extras. Once again, the second installment of Lord of the Rings should sweep every technical Oscar.

I don't however, think the film will win Best Picture. Why not? The story's not finished - for that, we'll have to wait until next December's "Return of the King." This was the middle episode, it leaves you aching for more. As Gandalf said "The battle for Helm's Deep is over. The battle for Middle Earth has just begun." If The Two Towers could pack so much war, darkness, love, valor and courage into one film, I shudder in anticipation as to what the final film will bring.

Regarding your comments on the thousands of orcs, I thought you might find this story over at Wired.Com interesting: http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,56778,00.html

Here's the text:

Digital Actors in Rings Can Think

WELLINGTON, New Zealand -- In a sparse, sunlit loft, programmer Stephen Regelous quietly works alone every day to the hum of his laptop. But what he's really doing is leading the masses.

Regelous created Massive, the special-effects program behind the colossal battles in The Lord of the Ringsfilm trilogy. Using Massive, the Oscar-winning Weta Digital team pulled off anticipated scenes for the latest installment, The Two Towers-- such as the battle at Helm's Deep -- by digitally generating smart crowds to supplement the live action.

The computer-generated characters, called agents, have minds of their own.

"Every agent has its own choices and a complete brain," Regelous said. "The most important thing about making realistic crowds is making realistic individuals."

To bring J.R.R. Tolkien's books to life, gathering 70,000 or so tall, broad-shouldered extras, dressing them in elaborate armor and choreographing them slaughtering each other was out of the question. And that was just one scene from the prologue to The Fellowship of the Ring.

So in 1996, director Peter Jackson asked Regelous, who had worked on Jackson's film The Frighteners,to come up with a program that could handle the task.

In Massive, agents' brains -- which look like intricate flow charts -- define how they see and hear, how fast they run and how slowly they die. For the films, stunt actors' movements were recorded in the studio to enable the agents to wield weapons realistically, duck to avoid a sword, charge an enemy and fall off tower walls flailing.

Like real people, agents' body types, clothing and the weather influence their capabilities. Agents aren't robots, though. Each makes subtle responses to its surroundings with fuzzy logic rather than yes-no, on-off decisions. And every agent has thousands of brain nodes, such as their combat node, which has rules for their level of aggression.

When an animator places agents into a simulation, they're released to do what they will. It's not crowd control but anarchy. That's because each agent makes decisions from its point of view. Still, when properly genetically engineered, the right character will always win the fight.

"It's possible to rig fights, but it hasn't been done," Regelous said. "In the first test fight we had 1,000 silver guys and 1,000 golden guys. We set off the simulation, and in the distance you could see several guys running for the hills."

For inspiration, Regelous didn't watch war movies as you might expect. Instead he experimented with artificial intelligence by growing digital plants, and studied how people avoided each other on crowded streets.

Massive is not just for making war. It was also used to generate doubles of the film's stars and to create flocks of birds.

"I wanted to take the processes of nature and apply them to generate computer imagery," Regelous said.

As a result, when the dark wizard Saruman leads his Uruk-hai warriors to Helm's Deep to crush the human alliance in The Two Towers,the army isn't made up of the same character copied and pasted 50,000 times, marching symmetrically like a chain of paper dolls.

"Every soldier is drawing from their own repertoire of military moves and determining how they will fight the fight," explained Richard Taylor, director of Weta Workshop, on New Line Cinema's site. "Some of the scenes that we'll see in Helm's Deep will defy belief."

Regelous plans to sell Massive for $40,000 per single floating license. Even if he doesn't win over the market, some say he's made great advances. Seth Lippman, a 3-D sequence lead for the first two Ringsfilms, said Massive surpasses techniques used for other Oscar-winning films he's worked on.

"In What Dreams May Come,the crowd characters were like 2-D billboards in space -- filler. They couldn't become main parts of the action," Lippman said. "The illusion created by using the 2-D billboards would be exposed when employing the radical 3-D moves Peter Jackson is famous for. With the Massive approach, he could fly cameras right through the middle of the battle."

For his part, Regelous is satisfied that Massive's agents are covert enough to win over fans of the classic trilogy.

"I can't tell what's Massive and what's not anymore."

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