Opinion

The Two Towers

Dir: Peter Jackson
Starring Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen

The Fellowship has been broken: Boromir is dead, Frodo and Sam are heading into Mordor, Merry and Pippin have been captured by the Uruk-Hai, and Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas are in pursuit. Meanwhile, from his tower at Isengard, Saruman The White is preparing for all-out war against the kingdoms of man, at the bidding of his master Sauron. And the first target of his immense army is the land of Rohan. The war for Middle Earth has begun.

Oh my word. There's a real danger that this could turn into one of those terrible, smarming reviews that seem to be written by people who only want to be quoted on film posters, so let's get the soundbites out of the way first: "Astonishing!" "Outstanding!" "Breathtaking!" "Utterly Magnificent!" There you go, that should keep the publicists happy.

If anyone emerges from The Two Towers less than certain that Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings is going to be the greatest film series ever, I'll be astonished. Whatever the minor flaws of each individual film, when viewed as a whole (and they demand to be viewed that way), they're shaping up to have more drive, spectacle, epic power, and sheer joy in the art of film-making than anything that has gone before them.

Structurally, this was always going to be the hardest of the books to bring to the screen - in many ways, not much has moved on between the beginning and the end of the film - Sam and Frodo are still outside Mordor, and though some reunions have been had among the rest of the Fellowship, the real battles remain to be fought. It's made clear at the end of this instalment that the victories won against the forces of darkness will only serve to make Sauron's wrath greater. But what this apparent meander in the course of the story allows is for Jackson to show the breadth of scope the story encompasses. All of Middle Earth is threatened, and this is the film that brings that point home. This is the film that defines the epic. Whether showing the various countries of the land, or the politics and internal strife which have weakened its people, or dwelling on the multitude of ordinary people caught up in a conflict that they can barely understand, or, ultimately, delivering what is quite simply the biggest, most savage battle (or call it a war, which is what it is) ever committed to celluloid, Jackson has created something entirely unique.

It's been commented that this is a much darker film that the first, and it is, both in tone and visuals, but Jackson has also leavened it with a great deal of humour. Possibly too much, in turning Gimli's role over almost completely to that of comic relief, but generally this works. The smaller moments also help to temper the sheer exhaustion that the battle sequences could otherwise instill - the last hour of the three hour running time is almost entirely combat, and especially in the scenes covering the battle for Helm's Deep, that's very nearly too much to take.

Visually, Jackson has once again led the effects teams to create an almost entirely convincing world, and certain of the effects (the realisation of Gollum, the assault on Isengard, and the Uruk-Hai army especially) have simply never been bettered. They occasionally make the CGI in this month's Bond movie look like it was done on a Sinclair Spectrum by comparison.

Faults there are, but few; the previously-mentioned Gimli slapstick grates rather, there's little time for character development among most of the Fellowship, and in three hours you'd think time could have been found for some, there really is a bit of a sense of treading water, especially in Frodo and Sam's tale, which diverts completely into their encounter with Faramir and the men of Gondor and doesn't really pick up again the way it does in the book. (Though I understand Jackson's reasoning in making this split - if he'd included the book's critical last sequence for the two, there'd be almost none of them in the third film.)

But none of that really matters. Jackson throws the audience head-first into the tale (there's no 'Last time, on The Lord Of The Rings' clip package, which is brave, but also an act of genius), and courtesy of story, effects, and a cast who almost never put a foot wrong, delivers possibly the best middle bit of a story ever....