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The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
(Reviewed December 12, 2002)
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Director/coscreenwriter Peter Jackson still can't tell a story worth a damn, you won't have any idea who some characters are or their relationships to each other (and good luck remembering their names), battle scenes are edited so sloppily that you occasionally won't know who is getting hacked and who is doing the hacking, your ass cheeks will go numb way before the three-hour (!!!) mark, and some of the CGI characters don't blend in well enough with the live action to look one-hundred-percent convincing...
...but "The Two Towers" still ranks as one of this year's true must-see movies, if only because it often is so visually spectacular, dazzling and ambitious even when it comes up short. (And when I say "must-see movie," I mean "get off your friggin' wallet and see it in an actual theatre." Watching this eye-candy extravaganza on a TV would be like looking at the Grand Canyon on a postcard.) The sheer, epic scale of the climactic battle, for example, falls under the category of "why the good lord invented great-big-huge movie screens."
The star of the show this time around is the pathetic, brain-addled, split-personalitied Gollum, who acts as guide for ring-bearer Frodo and his fellow hobbit Sam. (His words "my precious" are destined to become a part of every audience member's vocabulary.) Although you never will be able to forget that he is computer-generated (his movements are so unnaturally fast that it is impossible to believe he couldn't snatch Frodo's ring before anyone could react; the texture of his flesh looks unconvincing; and his eyes are like a pair of oversized starburst-cut class-ring stones), he's just plain more interesting than anybody else in the entire enterprise. The hobbits are innocent (sometimes sickeningly so), Gandalf is crafty, Aragorn and the warriors are rigidly noble and the legions of badass monsters are brainlessly determined--but Gollum is so scenery-chewingly all over the place that he ends up being more emotionally 3-D than any of them.
That too-quick CGI movements problem also affects other scenes, most notably an attack by riders who are mounted on some weird bear/wolf/horse hybrids. (What, you think I'm going to plow through hundreds of pages of Tolkien to see what the things are called?) The creatures move with such unnatural speed that they seem to have zero weight or mass. This same problem ruined "Spider-Man" for me earlier this year; that piece of computer code swinging from building to building was too unaffected by the laws of physics to be convincing as a teenager in a costume.
A few other things I didn't like: The endless "comic"-relief asides by fiesty dwarf John Rhys-Davies got old fast. Battle scenes in which one or two characters hold off hordes of hundreds are as silly as contemporary "can't hit the side of a barn" scenes in which the hero somehow never takes a bullet. In a story this long and weird, more explanation of what the heck the quest is all about definitely was needed. (If you've forgotten all the pre-history about the rings of power that was rushed through in the opening minutes of "The Fellowship of the Ring," tough luck--there is no recounting of that info whatsoever here.)
And even at over 180 minutes, the movie often seems like a "greatest action-'n'-scenery bits from the book" affair, because there is zero depth to many of the participants. That blond archer dude, for example. (If you can recall his name, you're a better man than I.) What's his deal? Sure, he looks good. Seems like an okay guy to have in your merry band. But he is as blank a slate as a red-shirted Enterprise crew member. (Oops...is my pocket-protector showing?)
Structure-wise, there are three concurrent storylines here involving the characters separated from each other at the end of "Fellowship." Two of those characters spend almost the entire movie in a tree. Excited yet? And if you are hoping to see lots and lots of Liv Tyler, dream on. She's in maybe three minutes of this flick...which is about twice as much screentime as Cate Blanchett gets this time around.
Then again, there are some knock-your-eyes-out scenes of enormously oversized elephants, monstrously-muscled gate-tenders, legions upon legions of hellaciously nasty-looking bastards with swords and pikes and crossbows, and possibly the best looking flying dragon you've ever seen. The blond chick in the clingy white damsel dress never drops her top, but you can't have everything. All of my nit-pickery aside, there's so much amazing stuff to stare at in this movie that nobody's going to regret buying a ticket.
Or to put it another way: Even though it is obvious that the main opening-weekend devotees of this movie will be trembling nerds whose idea of adventure involves daring to play a spirited round of Magic: The Gathering during lunch period...it sure beats the pants off the lousy new Star Trek movie. (Gosh, if only "X-Men 2" were out at the same time; talk about your Dork Trifecta!)
Back Row Grade: B-
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