With 'The Towers Towers' re-read, it was time to watch the movie again this weekend (and a long rambling review)...
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
'The Two Towers' is the weakest of the
Peter Jackson trilogy but only in the sense that it's got a few loose threads in a giant near-perfect tapestry. I totally adore re-watching it every time (this time in the Extended Edition version), so I might as well focus on picking apart the flaws, rather than gushing over it's brilliance again. I never liked the way that Théoden is literally and explicitly shown to be under a powerful ageing spell from Saruman, making him an impossibly old man, who morphs back into a King in the prime of his life. In the book (and other adaptations), he is an old man, before, during and after but has been made to feel feeble, powerless and timid by years of Wormtongue's crooked whisperings (it's only implied enchantment might be at play). In the book, Gandalf gives Théoden back his confidence and self-belief with mostly words, so the King rides off to face the danger, but later Théoden is exhausted by his advanced years and remarks that his age was not wholly feigned. His physical frailty but mighty heart, made him a more endearing character on the page. Not that I don't think
Bernard Hill does a brilliant acting job.
Brad Dourif also plays Gríma very well but the extreme "heroin addict" makeup, milky eye and greasy hair is too much combined with his sinister performance. There is no sense that anybody could've been seriously tricked into thinking this 100% evil looking Gríma's counsels were good. I also don't like the way he is spoken of as if
"Gríma Wormtongue" is the name on his passport, rather than
"Gríma, son of Gálmód", who is only called "Wormtongue" as a dark joke.
Comparing TTT closely with the book, the film's rendering of the world didn't look quite as faithful as in FotR. It has exactly the right feel for the different lands of Rohan, the Emyn Muil, the Dead Marshes, Fangorn and North Ithilien but the geography is less accurate. There are shots where we see mountain ranges in Rohan that look out of place, or too near and some of the dialogue was wrong. e.g. when Éomer encounters
"the three hunters" (who are running north), he should be riding south back down the orc trail, from the eaves of Fangorn but after they talk he shouts
"We ride North!" and so apparently goes in the opposite direction to which he was just travelling for no obvious reason. This is because of a wise bit of streamlining in the script, where instead of Éomer heading back south to Edoras and to imprisonment by Gríma, he's already been banished instead, so is presumed to be far away in the north later on, so he can unexpectedly ride to the rescue of Helm's Deep, instead of Erkenbrand of the Westfold. It was a good idea but they didn't get the geography quite right. I hadn't recalled that Erkenbrand originally approached Helm's Deep on foot (from the direction of the Fords of Isen), the heroic horse charge over the mountain into the scattering Orcs is another bit that Jackson lifted straight from
Ralph Bakshi's animated adaptation, rather than from the book. In the book, there is quite a bit of business taking place around the Fords of Isen, the Westfold and the Gap of Rohan (the area between Isengard and Helm's Deep) but in the film we never go there.
I'd forgotten that Sam often plays as more of the main protagonist, rather than Frodo in the book. We have much more insight into what Sam thinks about Frodo, Gollum and Faramir, than we do about what Frodo thinks, he is a more internally mysterious character. In the film the weighting is much more on to Frodo. Faramir is changed a lot from the book, where he is a wise, even tempered leader of men and a cunning and subtle interrogator. For story reasons, in the film he's far less intelligent, more corruptible, more pitiable but less admirable. I like the way
David Wenham plays him but I like the book version more. It's one of the many things that are stretched and twisted to make this middle chapter more dramatic, when I didn't think it was undramatic to begin with. I'd also include, the stodgy series of flashbacks in the middle (the Boromir one not included), the scramble to establish the Rohan characters (ahead of their natural introduction in the story), the weak Aragorn fake-out death and the extra scenes in Osgilliath. Although I very much appreciate actually seeing Osgilliath, as it's spoken about a lot but not seen (IIRC) in the book.
I hadn't realised how much of the book is not in the film. Unlike in the other two films that trim away a few tangential chapters to keep the story clipping along, TTT removes no chapters along the way, instead it just chops out the whole last third of the book. The final 8 chapters of the book (4 from each half) out 21 are dumped into the third film, which might explain the padding in this movie and the length of the next one. FotR had 22 chapters, with roughly 4 jettisoned, leaving 18 to adapt but RotK started with 19, only two are removed, then an extra 8 from TTT were added, so it had 25 to squeeze in! I can definitely see why ending the TTT film on the high of the Helm's Deep victory was a wise move dramatically (the exact same ending point as Bakshi's film) but I'm less sure dragging the Shelob cliffhanger into the third film was the right idea. This time, with a real war in Europe still happening, the film felt a little different to me. It originally had the post-911 period hanging over it (and briefly threatening a title change) but the ruined streets of Osgilliath and Théoden's line
"So much death. What can men do against such reckless hate?" (or it's book equivalent
"How shall any tower withstand such numbers and such reckless hate?" make it into a different kind of fantasy-based war movie.
Again only Costa Botes' 106-minute 'The Two Towers: Behind the Scenes' film seems to be on Letterboxd (and incorrectly titled). Michael Pellerin's incredible 6.5-hour epic 'The Appendices' documentary on TTT is not. So I'll review my re-watch of both here:
https://letterboxd.com/tm2yc/film/the-making-of-the-two-towers/
The Two Towers: The Appendices - Part 3: The Journey Continues… / Part 4: The Battle for Middle-Earth Begins (2003)
The behind the scenes problems of
'The Two Towers' reminded me of the somewhat chaotic
'The Hobbit' production, where
Peter Jackson and his team are really struggling with how to tell the middle part of a story and deal with the crunch of having a release date set in stone 12-months after FotR. So they are adding scenes, cutting scenes, filming pickup sequences that they've decided are 100% needed for the story, then deleting them anyway, delivering re-written pages to the actors seconds before they are on camera, improvising battle scenes on location, and not only editing the film right down to the wire but still editing the film while poor
Howard Shore is across the corridor trying to score it. I remembered there being some juicy tension between
Elijah Wood/
Sean Astin and
Andy Serkis because they were initially treating him like a mere physical stand in, rather than a fellow talented actor, due to this "performance capture" thing being a very new concept (partly pioneered by Serkis). But I'd forgotten about the tension between the key-frame-animation and motion-capture departments over how Gollum should be done and who should handle it. They are trying to be polite on camera but they sound annoyed. Gollum ending up being a real mix of both it seems, as it sounded like Jackson wanted to not hand animate him but the technology just wasn't quite there at this stage, so there was a lot of the animators effectively rotoscoping Serkis' performance by hand/eye. This middle documentary has many of the really legendary
Viggo Mortensen anecdotes, like him breaking his toe while kicking the Orc skull but not breaking character, having a tooth knocked out with a sword in the big battle and just calling for some superglue, so the filming could continue and him convincing the cast and crew to camp out by a lake overnight so they could film that epic sunrise shot of Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli running over the plains of Rohan.
The Two Towers: Behind the Scenes (2006)
There is a bit more repeat footage in this 2nd
Costa Botes doc and at first, too much focus on "backstage" shenanigans (to alleviate boredom in between shots), too little non-location based footage and not enough heated arguments being captured between the crew but it soon gets into some interesting areas. There is some footage of the massive animatronic Treebeard face acting (before it was replaced with CGI); a deliberately disorienting section where Botes cuts back and forth between the crew building Helm's Deep at two different scales, from similar angles; and some cool unused shots of Éowyn fighting Uruk-Hai in the caves behind Helm's Deep. IIRC the latter never features in either version of the finished film, or in the longer
Michael Pellerin making of doc.