The Lord Of The Rings - The Two Towers (DVD 2003)

Even though I was lost through some of it, I liked 'The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers' better than its predecessor, The Fellowship of the Ring. As the middle section of what is really one long story (or one long nine-hour movie), it doesn't bother setting anything up -- it assumes you've seen the first one-and just plunges in.
Whereas Fellowship gave us the sunlit complacency of the Shire darkening into grim duty, Two Towers begins on a note of near-disaster - a dream of the standoff between the wizard Gandalf and the fearsome Balrog - and mostly keeps its jaws clenched in readiness for hopeless battle. The theme of this Act Two is good warriors standing tall in the face of odds that could hardly suck worse.

If that sounds like a downer, it isn't; Peter Jackson, delivering the second of his three Christmas gifts to J.R.R. Tolkien fans worldwide, comes most alive during the scenes of peril and evil, of which there are enough here for a year's worth of movies. One could conceivably enjoy The Two Towers knowing very little of its conflicts or interspecies politics; it can be processed as pure cinema, and forget about the plotlines, which in any event are unavoidably way stations to The Return of the King. We do spend a great deal of the movie watching characters prepare for things that won't happen in the movie; even the big-bang sequence, the battle at Helm's Deep, is but a minor skirmish in the grand scheme of things.

A good deal of the dawdling is fun. The fearful comic-relief hobbits Merry and Pippin find themselves hanging on a massive walking and talking tree -- an Ent, really, a sort of plant elemental that watches over the green. These Ents talk slowly and arrive at decisions even more slowly; Jackson seems to be tweaking the ponderousness of most epics. Meanwhile, the human warrior Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) tries to get the woefully unprepared kingdom of Rohan ready for legions of merciless Uruk-hai sent by the evil wizard Saruman; and Frodo Baggins, bearer of Tolkien's mystical McGuffin the One Ring, and his loyal friend Samwise slouch towards Mordor to dispose of the thing, accompanied by the wretched Gollum.

Most of the hype surrounding Two Towers has centered on Helm's Deep and Gollum. Of the two -- and the battle is one of the best of its kind in film history, a symphony of bloodlust and hopes dashed and restored -- I prefer the little creature who used to be called Smeagol before the Ring stole his mind and soul. As you've heard, Gollum is played in voice and gesture by Andy Serkis, and fleshed out digitally by Jackson's computer wizards. You'll always be aware that Gollum isn't literally "real," but in his pathetically addled way he's more real than anyone else in the movie. Jackson seems to have studied Jar Jar Binks and learned from George Lucas's mistake.

Two Towers may play narratively as a downer, but Jackson is too spirited a director to get bogged down: Characters are always reminding each other to keep hope alive in the midst of dread and panic.Hope is there, too, in the raw beauty Jackson finds everywhere, whether in battle or in a poetically downbeat episode at Rivendell with a weeping Arwen.

Jackson hasn't disdained his horror-movie roots, either: no director could be happier among the Orcs and Uruk-hai, and he has the diabolical wit to end this second entry on a note of demented enthiusiasm that functions as a chilling cliffhanger.'Fellowship' interested and entertained me; this one hooked me