The right choices..

Rating: Null/10 (27 December 2002)

In his latest film, New Zealand's Peter Jackson has given us the Two Towers we wanted and deserved: rich, harsh, violent, alive, green, black and grey. Middle-Earth looms large as the greatest world the movies have yet given us. The fighting here is fiercer - there is sublime pleasure in the sight of lopped-off, muddy Orc heads arching end over end, of Uruk-hai spilling inky blood on the ruined walls of Helm's Deep. Hoo boy! Killing, in the noble name of all that is good and right in the world, has never looked more bad-ass and cool!
But the greatest battle scenes in recent film history are only part of the pleasure: Jackson skillfully juxtaposes the scenes at Helm's Deep with Frodo and Sam's funereal march to the lands of Sauron and with the triumphant march of the Ents against the foul and mechanical forces of Saruman. Frodo's passivity is punctuated by opaque rages, and there is great suspense in his own struggle and his struggle with the blighted creature Gollum (likewise in Gollum's self-struggle). The suspense in this film is of the best kind - it doesn't hinge on gradual revelation of plot points (besides, most of us know the plot backwards by now); instead, the suspense originates in identification, what could be called moral suspense. Middle-Earth is our world too, clearly allegorical (despite what Tolkien says) to our own struggles with technology, the dark, extrinsic forces of religious fundamentalism and the darker, intrinsic forces of our own nature. The Ring is attuned to both. Frodo is us, in his seemingly hopeless battle to retain his self, against the endless will and variety of evil arrayed against and within him.
The scenes with the Ents have been criticized on structural grounds, because they slow down the pace of the other two narratives. That is their weakness; their strength is that they provide respite from the otherwise demoralizing palette of grey, brown and black. The Ents, in the absence of a noble, good-humoured Faramir, provide the note of life and hope, and remind us that all nature rebels against the dominion of Sauron. A stirring theme, this one of nature vs. technology. Today, it is still a great, grim battle, and like the struggles in Tolkien's world, it takes place in the larger world and in us.