The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002, PG-13)

Still digging my rewatch of The Lord of the Rings trilogy.  Back in the day, I loved the first movie, but this one seriously upped the ante for me.  It was great to go back and experience this film again (premise spoilers.)

With the fellowship scattered after the events of the first film, the story takes three paths.  Frodo and Sam have continued forward alone on their quest to destroy the Ring; on their path, they encounter Gollum, a former keeper of the Ring driven mad by his desire for it.  Merry and Pippin try to escape capture by the Orcs, and as Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli work to rescue them, their journey takes them to Rohan, where dark forces are working against a kingdom of men.  There are trials, betrayals, feats of courage, and a climactic battle, and all the while, the Ring gets closer and closer to Mordor.

I can’t help but keep comparing this trilogy to The Hobbit, and I’m still kind of floored by how well-put-together these feel by comparison.  It reflects, I think, how The Lord of the Rings was made for the story it was telling while The Hobbit was contorted into a story it wasn’t.  In The Hobbit, I start losing interest whenever Bilbo isn’t around, because for me, the films are meant to be about him, and whenever they’re not, they start to get lost.  But The Lord of the Rings is meant to be a big epic with lots of different stuff going on, so I don’t mind when the members of the fellowship take different paths – it’s a little more akin to something like Game of Thrones (although less sprawling and not segmented into individual episodes,) where a group of characters can be offscreen for quite a while before we check in with them again.  Here, all the individual parts work for me.  I love watching Frodo and Sam’s journey (more on Gollum in a minute,) the battle of Helm’s Deep still gets me, and even the less-interesting bits with Pippin, Merry, and the Ents are okay because 1) they’re pretty brief, just enough to keep the characters present, and 2) the whole point of their segment is being away from the action and feeling stranded, wanting to help.

I said I’d revisit the CGI with this film, and I’d say the results are mixed.  The massive CGI stuff, like the Orc hordes look a little more video-gamey to my modern eyes, though I think it’s still used relatively sparingly compared to The Hobbit, where I thought the CGI battle stuff went way overboard.  More notable is Gollum.  Watching An Unexpected Journey for the first time, I thought Gollum looked about the same, but revisiting The Two Towers, I can see that there were some improvements over time.  In general, the motion-capture on Gollum looks damn good for the time – just shy of real, I’d say.  The biggest detractor isn’t the animation on him itself, but rather how he’s integrated into the scenes.  It looks a little bit like he’s moving around on top of the frame instead of being in it, and that’s where I think The Hobbit did better with him, making him look like he fit.

That said, Andy Serkis’s performance here is historic.  These days, you see motion-capture characters all the time, but his Gollum was something revolutionary in its day.  It was only uphill from there in terms of the actual technology, and his performance is just so crazy good.  The voice, the movements, the energy – everything is absolutely perfect for the character (and by the way, extra kudos to Elijah Wood and Sean Astin for acting so well against Serkis writhing around in a mo-cap suit in the days when no one was doing that yet – that takes talent, too.)  Other new cast members of note are an engaging Miranda Otto as Eowyn, Karl Urban as Eomer (used briefly but well,) Brad Dourif killing it as Wormtongue, and David Wenham doing a nice job as Faramir.

Warnings

Violence, scary stuff, drinking/smoking, and thematic elements.