The Lord of the Rings:

The Two Towers

Reviewed By Rich Drees

     Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is a hard movie to review if only for the fact that it’s like watching only the middle act of a three-act play. The characters have all been introduced and the plots sets in motion. Now comes the complications.

     Towers picks up almost immediately after last year’s The Fellowship of the Ring ends- the Fellowship has been broken, leaving only Frodo (Elijah Wood) and Sam (Sean Astin) to continue the journey to destroy the evil One Ring of power while Aragorn (Viggo Mortenson), Legolas (Orlando Bloom) and Gimli (John Rhys-Davies) pursue the orcs who have captured Merry (Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd). (If you’re lost at even this point you should probably go and rent Fellowship before heading out to Two Towers.) Frodo finds that as they draw closer to the land of Mordor where they will dispose of the Ring, that the weight of carrying the Ring increases. Complicating matters is the arrival of Gollum (Andy Serkis), a former owner of the Ring who may be in league with the evil Sauron.

     Meanwhile, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli, having been assured by an unexpected old friend that Merry and Pippin are safe, head to warn King Theoden (Bernard Hill) of Gondor that the wizard Saruman’s (Christopher Lee) forces are on the march to destroy his kingdom. Theoden leads his subject to the fortress of Helm’s Deep for safety but they are soon besieged by Saruman’s army of orcs.

     Visually, The Two Towers exceeds director Peter Jackson’s work of Fellowship of the Ring. As the narrative takes us further into the realms of Middle Earth, depth of design for each culture is astounding. Equal care has been lavished on the creature design, no easy feat when it came to realizing such fantastic creatures as the tree-like Ents.

     Special mention needs to be made of Gollum. Created through a combination of actor Andy Serkis and the effects wizards at Jackson’s effects company WETA Digital, the character raises the bar in artificially created characters.

     There are more action pieces in Towers than in Fellowship, the high point being the night battle at Helm’s Deep as a horde of ten thousand orcs descends on the fortress. The scope of this battle is magnificent, recalling and yet dwarfing even the great epics from Hollywood’s golden age.

     Jackson has again made some modifications to Tolkien’s text that may upset strident Tolkien purists. One that works surprisingly well is giving the film’s many comic moments to Gimli. His  one-liners never run the risk of coming off as distracting from the drama at hand but actually define the character’s courage in the face of overwhelming odds and to delineate the growing friendship between himself and Legolas.

     Some changes are harder to judge. The most glaring alteration is to the character of Faramir (David Wenham) who takes Frodo, Sam and Gollum to the besieged city of Osgiliath. Whether this is a revision that will work in the overall structure of the three films as it feels like set up for next winter’s Return of the King.