The Two Towers, the second book of JRR Tolkien’s three-volume Lord of the Rings, rather clumsily follows one narrative strand in its first half, then, in the second, goes back to the start to trace another. Sensibly, Peter Jackson, director of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers has made extensive use of one of the things cinema is very good at — intercutting.
Every film student is acquainted with the key moment in cinema history when some genius realised that you could heighten the suspense of a chase by rapidly cutting between pursuers and pursued. So Jackson puts all the narrative streams in the same time-frame and flashes between them.
If you haven’t read the book(s) or seen the first film in the trilogy, you will have no idea what is going on here. Then again, if you haven’t seen it you probably aren’t interested in the trilogy as a whole, so it doesn’t matter. Basically, a mixed bunch of humans, elves, dwarfs and hobbits (I don’t need to explain what a hobbit is, do I?) are engaged trying to stop the dark lord Sauron getting his hands on the magical ring that will give him total power. Orcs, by the way, are the hideous warriors of Sauron and his henchman Saruman (Christopher Lee); now there are some super-orcs, too, called Uruk-hai, specially bred by Saruman to help destroy the world.
Saruman, you see, is a eugenicist as well as an industrialist. In Tolkien’s eyes, this makes him particularly wicked. The evil wizard breeds monsters out of the dead land — having killed the land by chopping down all the trees to feed his vast subterranean furnaces. As one character or creature puts it, Saruman “has a mind of metal and wheels — he no longer cares for growing things”.
In Tolkien’s mythology, which is to say his moral universe, the opposition between gentle rural folk like the hobbits and the industrial villains is very clear. The evil realms of Mordor and Saruman’s Isengard are huge, dark satanic mills. Isengard’s come-uppance at the hands or branches of creatures that are practically trees themselves is, or should be, particularly satisfying.
That satisfaction, however, is somewhat diminished by the fact that the fall of Isengard takes place at the same time as the great siege of Helm’s Deep, which is the setpiece of the movie and perhaps the most impressive battle scene ever made on film. By comparison with that epic conflict, in which the heroic Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) and his allies defend the mountain keep, Isengard seems almost a throwaway episode. But then it’s obvious that Jackson and his co-adaptors were not going to be able to get everything in. At just under three hours, the movie is quite long enough, and the attention to detail, in the midst of all the big things, is staggering as it is.
The combination of live-action and computer-generated imagery is seamless, though some of the imagery is a little disappointing. The Ents (the tree-like creatures) are perhaps a little too cutesy, and Gollum, the ring’s previous owner, was, for me, a bit too ET (and his motivation is fuzzy). But then one can’t match one’s own visualisations against Jackson’s; one has to surrender and go with his vision.
It’s a vision that overwhelms. His camera, alone, sweeps one along — it swirls through the air, taking in vast vistas, or circling around characters as they confront each other. The movement is unstoppable. The Two Towers rather suffers in pure narrative terms, being both a sequel and a prequel and thus dependent on the first film for its background and the third film, yet to come, for its real resolution, but it lacks nothing in drive and interest. It has a bit of romance, which is sentimental but adds something to the character of Aragorn (and he’s certainly the protagonist, by default, of this episode) and it also has humour, which is welcome. As visual spectacle alone, it has no peer.
And then there’s the hair. It’s completely appropriate in the context, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much hair — long, matted, ratty, wet or dry, curly or straight, on head or on chin, in a single movie. Even Hair or Shampoo.