Famous Last Words

Rating: Null/10 (15 November 2006)

Yes, I too was duly impressed with The Two Towers. I found it a better film than Fellowship, and still found Fellowship to be a great movie, so my impression of The Two Towers is that it is a great work.
It's the second of three, and has not had the advantage Lucas had with The Empire Strikes Back. Potentially it suffers the same fate as Titanic, where everybody knows the outcome.
(I was very surprised to hear Jay Leno broadcast that he has never read LoTR - that he has not read it is no surprise, considering who he is; that he should admit this is amazing: He's telling the whole world what they might not already understand about him.)
Understanding that it takes jumping through quite a few hoops to pull off makes it all the more interesting to watch, but Jackson's sense for the dramatic is great. There are scenes leading up to Helm's Deep where the editing does it all - scenes that had the public in our theatre wrestling with themselves and their emotions, and there is no way Tolkien himself could have brought out such matters in the book itself.
I think the music got a bid grandiose at times, a bit overpowering, but on the whole it was a good score, unlike the 'art' of composers Arnold and especially Williams who have this uncanny ability to totally ruin a movie.
Gollum was a major feat. Many have said it's the best CGI ever, and one would be hard put to not agree. It certainly shames ILM thoroughly.
Woods' Frodo is still a disappointment. One reviewer in the UK praised Astin for saving the scenes where Woods looks like he's going to make a pass at him. I agree: Woods more or less looks the part, but I don't think we're seeing great acting here. Astin, however, does a remarkable job - he does impress, and much more than in Fellowship.
The girls love Orlando Bloom. His is a bit of Errol Flynn. My hero is Viggo, who doesn't have a clean face in 179 minutes. The portrayal of Strider brings home the gritty reality of a story that in book form was cloaked in niceties.
The sex angle is mostly lost in the book too, but here we have lots of it, and a possible love triangle as well. This is well done of Jackson in my opinion: LoTR is otherwise too much of a 'guys story', and it makes it all so much more real.
Time and again I found myself in a position - a predicament - unlike that of the reader of the book. Where the book offers a fantasy with lots of cool characters and a derring- do plot, the movie, with its incredible realism, makes you a part of the story, and you can't really close your eyes and fall off to sleep - you live in this world, a world that is basically an evil, threatening one.
I think Jackson has transcended Tolkien: He's taken LoTR and given it a vision, and I am sure he and his crew have studied the book meticulously, and therefore been able to bring out detail most readers did not notice or soon forgot.
Elsewhere at the IMDb one can read of dissatisfied surfers who don't want to wait another year for the finale, who think that six months is too long to wait for a SE DVD; and I think the irony here is thick.
For starters, JRR Tolkien was a professor and expert and lover of the English language; and yet here we find some of the worst abuses of it ever. And no one seems capable of even reflecting on the themes presented by JRR; it's more about how good the CGI is, how good other special effects are, or in the best possible case how well the movie follows the book. And yet JRR had something very important to say. Here's a message that could be debated for a long time, with the human race the great benefactor.
But no. We shall instead agree that Smeagol is well done and that some of the helicopter landscape shots are well formatted and that Treebeard is convincing, Mr Greenleaf is still the swooner, and that Aragorn son of Arathorn is a fitting successor to Middle Earth.