Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by clarkjohnsen (R) on December 18, 2002 at 14:04:53

First, a very readable review from The Boston Globe:

"Towers" of power

Smart, seamless action makes second 'Lord of the Rings' an epic of legendary proportions

By Ty Burr, Globe Staff, 12/18/2002

We know what to expect this time.

Everything that came as a shock last December, when ''The Fellowship of the Ring'' was released, we're ready for now: the surging, unfamiliar New Zealand landscapes that serve so well as Middle-earth, the way director Peter Jackson creates a privileged aura of legend while propelling the story forward, the preposterous rightness of Elijah Wood as Frodo, Ian McKellen as Gandalf, Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn, and - really, who knew? - Liv Tyler as Arwen.

The miracle is that ''The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers'' is better: tighter, smarter, funnier, and graced with a more realized sense of epochs shifting on the actions of smallish individuals. It builds cleanly toward the climactic battle of Helm's Deep instead of constantly pausing, as ''Fellowship'' did, for a series of donnybrooks. And it introduces a character who, in Jackson's imagining of him, provides the one thing Tolkien never had much use for: dramatic irony.

That character is Gollum, and he catches up with Frodo and Sam (Sean Astin) early on in the new movie. Since the Fellowship abruptly splintered at the end of the last installment, ''Towers'' shuttles back and forth between the group's constituent parts. Pressing into the country of Rohan to confront the armies of bad-seed wizard Saruman (Christopher Lee) are the three warriors: human Aragorn (Mortensen, eye candy for the ladies), elf Legolas (Orlando Bloom, ditto for the teenage girls), and dwarf Gimli (John Rhys-Davies, comic relief for everyone else).

Spare-wheel hobbits Merry (Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd) are captives of Saruman's orcs until they are rescued by Treebeard the Ent, who is perhaps best described as the apple tree from ''The Wizard of Oz'' minus the sociopathic urges. Frodo and Sam, of course, are bound for Mordor to drop Sauron's one true Ring of power into the fires in which it was forged. Since AAAdoesn't exactly provide a Triptik for this sort of thing, the two are forced to rely on the guidance of Gollum, the slimy, devolved flapdoodle who lost the Ring to Frodo's Uncle Bilbo back in ''The Hobbit'' and who has been lusting slurpily after his ''precious'' ever since.

Gollum is a computer-generated character, and your heart may sink when he first waddles into sight: with his perfectly mottled skin, street-lamp eyes, and deftly rendered strands of lank hair, he pulls the film in the direction of a high-end video game. But the kindness with which Frodo treats Gollum short-circuits the creature's rage and leads to some marvelously bipolar dialogues between his good and evil sides. Gollum's voice and movements are provided by Andy Serkis, and it's a tribute to the actor that by the time ''Towers'' comes crashing to a close, we've accepted Gollum as a full-time member of the crew - and by far the most interestingly conflicted.

True to Tolkien, everyone else is stalwart in heart and deed, and thus a bit of a stick. Characters don't speak in ''Lord of the Rings,'' they declaim, and all that earnestness might pall if the scope of ''Towers'' weren't so convincingly epic. The audience jaws start dropping from the very first scene, which rewinds to Gandalf's battle with the Balrog from ''Fellowship'' but this time plunges over the cliff with the combatants as they wrassle and smite in midair.

It's a sequence most movies would save as a capper; Jackson serving it up before the opening credits roll is just his waggish way of reminding you who's boss.

The main action in ''Towers'' centers on the kingdom of Rohan, which is being assaulted by the combined armies of Sauron and Saruman as a prelude to a full-on conquest of Middle-earth. King Theoden (Bernard Hill) is under the spell of evil adviser Grima Wormtongue (Brad Dourif) - do you deserve to be king if you hire an adviser named Grima Wormtongue? - the prince is dead, his cousin Eomer (Karl Urban) exiled, and Eomer's tough-but-tender sister Eowyn (Miranda Otto) besieged by Grima's unwanted attentions.

When Aragorn and the others arrive to buck up the Rohanians' esprit de corps, he and Eowyn exchange a few heavy-lidded looks - and a good thing, too, since Otto is the most warm-blooded actress to wander into these movies yet. Aragorn's heart, though, remains with faraway elf princess Arwen, and, anyway, who has time for first dates when the armies of the night are approaching in all their terrible computer-generated splendor?

Jackson is one of the very few directors able to fluently combine live-action footage and digital animation, and he has a gift for pop-Wagnerian grandeur that reclaims cinema's primal power. The skirmish midway through between the heroes and Saruman's hyena-riding troops rivals Kurosawa's desperate choreography, and the Helm's Deep wrap-up is as clear as a military diagram and a frightening, panicky chaos.

It's all hooey, of course - unless you're an adolescent or a Tolkien addict, you have to admit this - but it's hooey with conviction, muscle, and wit, and for the film's three hours you're raised up into the kind of exalted storytelling that the ''Star Wars'' and ''Harry Potter'' movies only feebly promise. George Lucas should watch this and hang his head in shame.

A final thought: ''Towers'' is a war film when all is said and done - one that's definitely not for children - and some will take that all the way to the metaphorical bank. Is it a coincidence that the movie appears as America tries to reinvent itself as a lean, mean aggression machine? Well, yes, it is. In point of fact, ''The Lord of the Rings'' makes a lousy recruiting poster, devoted as it is to the notion that war is hell on Middle-earth.

Anyway, the major structural problem with the story has always been that its archvillain, Sauron, is a smoke-and-mirrors bugaboo - a barely anthropomorphized stand-in for whatever you think is wrong with the world. Some have decoded him as Hitler, while others believe Tolkien's gripe is against the modern industrialist state. If you want to see Saddam Hussein in that fiery eye of Mordor, be my guest - if you squint, Christopher Lee's Saruman might even pass for Osama bin Laden - but keep in mind that it would be just as easy for someone else to see George W. Bush.

Personally? I see my grade-school gym teacher.

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And then this dyspeptic (and probably more real) view from Duncan Shepherd:

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Another three hours on the journey of a thousand miles, with pretty much the entire third hour given over to a single indecisive battle. (And now: "The battle for Middle-earth is about to begin.") The viewer who did not scrounge up the video of Part One for a refresher, or who has not committed the Tolkien books to memory, might have some difficulty getting his bearings. More simply, the storytelling is terrible. (Yeah, sure, the technology is terrific.) Every now and then someone, usually Viggo Mortensen or Orlando Bloom, will give a decent impression of being a legendary hero in a timeless landscape, but the point and purpose remain vague generalities. And the subhead of Part Two notwithstanding, it will be futile to search for 9/11 prophecy beyond (once again) the vaguest generality: "So much death! What can men do against such reckless hate?"