Film Review: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
Second part of the trilogy. Read the first part's review here: The Fellowship of the Ring
The first film was described in these pages as a necessary picture rather than a great one — the hinge on which a landmark turned, and the least interesting part of it. That judgement was made with the whole arc in view, and the second part is what justifies it. Where The Fellowship was all introduction, its slow-crawl geography and its dumped prologue, The Two Towers is the instalment that spends the capital the first one earned. It is the best of the three by a distance, and it is best precisely where the first was weakest: in the confidence of its own darkness.
The structural gamble is enormous and, perversely, pays. Jackson runs three separate strands — Frodo and Sam trudging toward Mordor with Gollum as guide and liability; Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli in pursuit of the captured hobbits, drawn into the politics of a broken Rohan; Merry and Pippin in Fangorn, waiting for a forest to make up its mind. The screenwriters do not merely follow Tolkien here; they depart from him repeatedly, and mostly to the film's benefit. What the first film lacked — a sense of consequence, of things being lost rather than merely threatened — arrives now with real weight.
That darkness is the film's engine and its argument. Rohan is a kingdom already half-ruined before the audience meets it: a hall of exiles, a child king in all but name, a court poisoned by Wormtongue's whisper and a king's mind held hostage inside his own skull. Gríma's quiet corrosion and Théoden's exorcism are nastier and stranger than anything in the first film. Across the map, Saruman has industrialised evil — Isengard as a smoking pit, the felling of Fangorn for furnaces, an army bred rather than conscripted. And in the Frodo strand, the Ring's gravity is felt in the body: Gollum's split self, the bickering, the moment Frodo is taken for a wraith by his own allies. The Osgiliath detour is the one invention that earns its keep, giving Faramir a genuine crisis rather than the saintly walk-on of the book. Not all of it works: the padding around Aragorn and Arwen's long-distance romance sags, the Ents are played too long for laughs before their turn, and the warg attack is a set piece in search of a purpose.
Into that grim world comes the title, and with it one of the stranger bits of trivia attached to any blockbuster of the period. Released a little over a year after September the 11th, the film carried a subtitle that suddenly read as documentary. The novel's title predates the attacks by nearly half a century, of course — the "two towers" being, depending on which reading of Tolkien you favour, Orthanc and Barad-dûr, or Minas Morgul and Cirith Ungol — but that did nothing to stop the arguments. There were loud suggestions, in marketing chatter and letters pages alike, that the subtitle be changed or dropped altogether, that the twin towers be quietly replaced with something less loaded, that an audience still raw from the skyline's wound would find the coincidence either unbearable or unbearably neat. Others insisted the resonance was the point and that the ambiguity — two towers, which two, whose? — was the sort of gift no campaign could buy. It was, in the end, a controversy conducted almost entirely in the abstract: nobody changed anything, and the film arrived under its original title, quietly freighted with a meaning Tolkien never intended and audiences could not help supplying.
And then there is Helm's Deep. In the novel it is a chapter and a half, a brisk affair of a few hundred men behind a wall. Jackson turns it into a night-long siege of ten thousand, and it is one of the most impressive battle scenes of the young century — a claim worth defending carefully, because the easy version of it is only about scale. The achievement is tactical. Jackson establishes the ground before he uses it: the causeway, the culvert, the Deeping Wall, the gate, the keep, the stair, the higher and higher redoubts the defenders are pushed back through. Every phase of the assault is legible; every stage of the retreat is a position given up. The elves' volley discipline, the ladders and the blasting charge, the sortie and its cost, the dawn ride down the slope — it holds together as an engagement rather than a montage, and the exhaustion is dramatised as strategy rather than merely as sweat. Add to that the staging craft: the rain and the torchlight, the impossible verticality of the wall, the sound design's percussive dread, and the sheer nerve of the long, unbroken push-in through the carnage. It is the sequence that every filmmaker reaching for a siege since has had to answer to, and most have come off worse. It is a reference point, and it will remain one.
The performances are the best of the trilogy. Bernard Hill gives Théoden a broken dignity that survives his own humiliation; Miranda Otto's Éowyn is steel under courtesy, and her scenes with Aragorn are the film's warmest; Andy Serkis does something genuinely new with Gollum that no amount of effects wizardry could supply on its own. Against that, Elijah Wood's Frodo grows a little too saintly, and the comic business between Legolas and Gimli begins its long slide into catchphrase.
The charge that the film is an unfinished thing — that it begins mid-stride and stops mid-stride, that it is all middle — is fair but misses the point. A middle is what it was commissioned to be, and it is a superb middle: darker, crueller, better staged and better acted than its predecessor. As with The Empire Strikes Back, the second part is where the series stops being an introduction and becomes a proper film. That it set a bar the third part could not clear — a finale that, as noted elsewhere, grew flabby and self-satisfied in its own length — is no fault of this one.
RATING: 8/10
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