Nerds with Swords!

Rating: Null/10 (19 January 2003)

I'll admit it  I gave up reading J.R.R. Tolkkien's `The Two Towers' halfway through. The book plodded for me more slowly than the anthropomorphized tree in which two of its heroes spend virtually the entire story. Peter Jackson's film of `the Fellowship of the Ring,' though, made me wonder if I'd perhaps been too impatient with the trilogy. The furious intensity and imagination he brought to that film convinced me that I dug this stuff after all. But just like those guys who dress up in chain mail and hit each other with padded swords, `The Two Towers' reminds me why I've never really gotten into fantasy. All the extraordinary production values of the first film are there  not surprising, as they were filmed at the same time  but one suspects that this installment could easily be skipped without missing the larger impact of Tolkkien's universe. The problem is that the `The Two Towers' essentially amounts to nothing more than a pointless aside in the epic trilogy of swordplay and sorcery. As expected, we pick up with our friends from Middle Earth as we left them  covered with Middle Dirt and speaking proper fantasy-inflected English, still questing to cast the One Ring of Power into the fires of Mount Doom. Along the way, hobbits Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamje pick up the dubious guide services of Gollum, a scheming creature who appears to be a CGI rendition of Willem Dafoe. The film culminates in the battle of Helms Deep, the last ditch survival effort of the race of men against the invading armies of Mordor. The scope of this spectacle flirts with the impressive, although anyone familiar with `Army of Darkness' will have a hard time suppressing a chuckle at the sweeping shots of armored ghoulies gurgling and yawning menacingly. The puzzling bit, at least to the uninitiated, is that by the end of the film everyone is pretty much in the same place they began, giving rise to the suspicion that Tolkkien was perhaps trying to stretch this whole business a bit further than prudence would dictate  like introducing Vance and Coy on `The Dukes of Hazzard.' The film's cinematography is again breathtaking, but is left searching for material worthy of its scope. There's walking, riding (on both horse and tree), and even a bit of running, but little else to warrant the constant swooping cameras. After an hour or so, `The Two Towers' begins to feel more like a fantasy edition of National Geographic than a necessary middle chapter of what might work better as a two-part tale.