When word got out that Tolkien’s Lord
of the Rings trilogy was making its way to the big screen,
expectations couldn’t have been higher. It didn’t matter who was starring
in it. It didn’t matter that the director, Peter
Jackson, had spent most of his career making gross-out comedies.
It didn’t even matter if we had read the books. Just about all of
us have talked to a Tolkien aficionado at some point. Perhaps we encountered
them somewhere on the Internet, perhaps they were among our closest
friends. The Lord of the Rings was clearly more than a story,
even more than a good story. It was one of the greatest fantasy and
adventure tales ever penned. Thus, the film should join the ranks
of Star
Wars, The
Godfather, Casablanca,
and few others as a film that delivers to the full on every level
and may even find the time to achieve more. Like the first installment,
The
Fellowship of the Ring, The
Two Towers is surely an excellent film, but it doesn’t
meet the above expectations.
Fellowship’s major flaw was that it left us asking for more. Too
much more. Frodo (Elijah
Wood) and Sam (Sean
Astin) continue their quest to burn the ring in the fires of Mount
Doom, while the newly formed fellowship tries to rescue the captured
hobbits Pippin and Merry. And? Exactly. This anti-climax shows why
Tolkien hated dividing his story into three parts. Fellowship doesn’t
leave us satisfied but craving action.
And action is what we get in The Two Towers. Though we may
get more than we would have asked for. The evil wizard Saruman (Christopher
Lee) sends an army to raid the castle of Theoden (Bernard
Hill). The reluctant king-to-be Aragorn (Viggo
Mortensen) comes in with his own army to help fight off Saruman’s
forces, while the hobbits try to convince a race of tree people to
conduct a similar raid on Saruman’s own castle.
The result is epic battle scene after epic battle scene. They are
surprisingly realistic, considering they involve elves and undead
mutants. Genuine terror and suspense are created in almost every frame.
The bad guys may not resemble any species on this planet, but if pure
evil were ever to be embodied, it would come in their form. It may
not be easy to remember which group is called the Orcs and which is
called the Uruk-Hai, but it’s impossible to forget that both groups
look menacing enough to make the Imperial
Storm Troopers soil their useless “body armor."
Though the film delivers on what its first installment set up, it
doesn’t add anything. Unlike the first film, there is no central character
to focus on. While every character we meet is engaging and ably acted,
none of them are particularly sympathetic. The tale of good versus
evil remains just as black and white as ever, with no extra dimensions
added to the story. The imagination of Star Wars is combined
with the depth of The Godfather, but the ambiguity of the
latter is missing, as is the escapist optimism of the former. Good
versus evil is nowhere near as compelling as good people doing evil
things and vice versa. The Godfather put that conflict at
the center of most of its characters, and made every event seem not
only suspenseful but tragic as well.
The protagonists of LOTR range from heroic to hesitantly
heroic, and the antagonists only inspire our fear and hatred. Star
Wars never claimed to be anything more than a homage to fifties’
serials. It was always certain that Luke
would win in the end. The story wasn’t so much about him battling
the Empire’s forces as it was about him defeating them and rescuing
the princess. The Two Towers, on the other hand, with its
night-time footage, realistic epic battles, and ominous score, doesn’t
have such a certain outcome. The forces of evil seem as if they may
be capable of winning the battle after all. While it is a magnificent
film, it doesn’t join the ranks of the classics, because its story
never amounts to anything more than an adventure, and its mood is
too eerie to appropriately serve that spirit. Escapism cannot reach
its maximum potential if it doesn’t take place in a world to which
we would want to escape, and a drama cannot do the same if its characters
have no inner conflict. Perhaps Tolkien never intended for his tale
to be so brooding, or perhaps he had written a flawed (albeit brilliant)
story to begin with.
All this, however, may serve to help the series’ third entry. In
the final battle between good and evil, escapism can reach a higher
effect than ever if good wins all-out. And if that’s not the case,
there may just be a powerful message lurking in this epic after all.
Either way, the LOTR series has already given us two films
that, while not perfect, have gone above and beyond the call of duty
to deliver breathtaking storytelling.
