The Two Towers

ByThe Plaid Adder
Comments:plaidder@mindspring.com

A film is necessarily different from a novel or a play, and directors fail to recognize this at their peril. If all you're doing is attempting to transfer the experience of reading the novel to film, you will inevitably fail, not just because of time constraints but because you just can't tell a story in film the same way you would tell it in print. Recent film history is littered with the bones of people who forgot this--the highly disappointing film of Toni Morrison's Beloved is one prime example, but of course the Harry Potter movies suffer from the same problem. So it doesn't bother me, per se, that Jackson is changing the books as he makes the films. What matters is whether he's doing it right. I felt in Fellowship of the Ring that he pretty much was. Here, I still think that most of the time he's doing it right, but his batting average has dropped.

You can see what Jackson's first principles are; and again, most of the time, they're good ones. He seems to be primarily concerned with conveying things through visuals and action rather than dialogue and with making the film more emotionally coherent by making the fellowship characters not only more central but more active than they often are in the books. Both principles are eminently sensible; the follow-through is sometimes a little dodgy. For an example of Jackson's strategy working, I turn to what happened with the Ents/Pippin/Merry plotline. Entish language and culture, which of course is paced for trees and therefore reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally slooooooooow, is just about the worst thing you could be trying to transfer to the big screen, and I think Jackson did a good job of both showing us what the Ents are like and moving the viewers through what is definitely one of the more leisurely sections of the book. Sure, we lose a lot of detail, but we get the essentials; and by making the Ents' decision to go to war the result of Pippin's cunning rather than the Ents' excruciatingly long and slow Council debate, Jackson provides more to do for Pippin and Merry (who, in the novel, are basically just sort of along for the ride) and adds another layer of emotional excitement (since we get to witness first-hand Fangorn's rage, grief, battle-fury, etc. upon discovering the corpses of his friends).

On the other hand, doing it this way does ask us to believe that Fangorn the tree-herd has had no idea, all this time, that Saruman has been deforesting the land around Isengard, which of course is ridiculous.So there is always a tradeoff; and sometimes, we lose on the trade. For instance, while I thought the film by and large did a great job with the plot line following Frodo, Sam, and Gollum--Gollum was far more creepy, and convincing, than you'd ever think a CGI character could be--I also thought Jackson did us kind of a disservice by devoting such a disproportionate amount of time to the battle at Helm's Deep, which takes up all of 15 pages in the novel. Not that I minded the battle itself--as battles go, I found it very engaging, all 25 minutes of it--so much as the fact that it took time away from Frodo's part of the story, and in the end forced Jackson to end the film much earlier than the novel. It may be that he's deliberately saving up that plot line for the third movie because he's planning to cut so much of the forsoothery and post-victory praising with great praise--and certainly I wouldn't argue with that--but still, it's a shame to lose the angst of that second ending, with Frodo "alive, but in the hands of the enemy." *That's* a cliffhanger; whereas the ending to this film, once again, is softened, so that Gollum's sinister plotting is contrasted with the Frodo/Sam lovefest (get your mind out of the gutter) and the victory at Helm's Deep. (Speaking of which--am I the only one who, after a 25- minute battle scene, would like more than a 2-second voice-over-covered representation of the actual victory?)

The decision to lighten up the ending is of a piece with what I saw as an unfortunate increase in cheese toward the end of the film. The biggest cheese moment is Sam's inspirational speech to Frodo (too long, too hackneyed, too much swelling of the orchestra), but there's also a lot of cheese attached to Gandalf the White, especially the slow-motion film of Shadowfax trotting over and that unbelievable shot of him rearing up on Shadowfax in the dawn light at the battle. Also a mistake, in my view, is the good Gollum/bad Gollum argument; in general I think the film did a good job of character development for poor old Smeagol, but I think it was Going Too Far to literalize things like that (he does, after all, always call himself "we;" but does this have to mean he actually has a split personality?). Other things that bug me include the passage of the Gratuitous Aragorn Endangerment Act (why am I watching Aragorn fall over a cliff when we could be spending more time in Mordor?).

All the same, when the film works, it *works,* and I hope for the sake of his fans that Lucas is taking copious notes about how to use CGI. I loved the Ents' destruction of Isengard, with the river sweeping everything away ("Ooh, look, the tree who's on fire gets to put himself out!" I said, gleefully), and even the @#$! Endless Battle at Helm's Deep, complete with anachronistic and gratuitous dwarf-tossing jokes. Largely because Jackson has elected not to render their dialogue too faithfully, Legolamb and Giblet are growing on me; especially Gimli, who charges into battle with the same kind of glee that you can see on Exeter's face during the battle scenes in Branagh's *Henry V*, and with whom I could certainly sympathize as he was trying to keep up with Aragorn and Legolas on their 3-day run ("Dwarves are natural sprinters! Very dangerous over short distances!"). And the Eye of Sauron gets even scarier as we get closer to it, and the Dead Marshes are very terrifying, and so on and so forth. So, all in all, I guess, the verdict is: Bring on The Return of the King--only I hope I can opt out of the cheese course.