January 18, 2003

Unreached Potential
Mark

The Two Towers in no way compares to FotR in terms of a movie achieving its potential...

this movie had a rushed, incomplete feeling whereas the first gave the sense that years had been spent on crafting the final product...

PJ didn't edit the scenes together properly, and the first 90 minutes had a choppy feel to them, before the fiasco of the warg sidetrack which had no place in this film, and served no purpose to fuel the story...

tons and tons of continuity errors:

how did the two tribes of orcs, Uruk-Hai and urks of Sauron, come together...clearly at the end of FotR only the Uruks were present when Merry and Pip were taken...would have made the infighting much more understandable between the two tribes...

how did Aragorn get Brego as a mount when clearly Brego was not one of the two horses given to the companions by Eomer at the beginning?

Haldir arrives at Helm's Deep w/ greetings from Elrond when last we saw Haldir was in Lorien, not Rivendell...and were all the Elves that went to Helm's Deep slaughtered? there was no indication either way, other than none were to be seen when Gandalf and Eomer showed up...

how does Faramir know that Boromir is dead?

these are all things that fans of the novels would know, but when you exclude such obvious points of continuity in the movie itself, they are easily noticed...

other gripes:

no new music...where is Gollum's theme? Treebeard's theme? Grima's theme? most of the music was a rehash of the first film, and the "richness" of the experience I felt while watching FotR was absent in some scenes because of a lack of music...

lines such as, "A parent should never have to bury their child," is about as cliched as Hollywood gets, and entirely unTolkien...I don't know how many movies I've heard this line in...I can't believe I heard it in a Tolkien film...

cheesy...

Gimli, played entirely for laughs...cheesy...really missed the scene where he goes at it w/ Eomer about Galadriel...

flashbacks of Arwen, cheesy...the Aragorn/Arwen love interest was established well enough in the first film...this film would have been better served to play up the developing relationship between Aragorn and Eowyn while keeping Arwen in the background until RotK...I've seen enough slow-mo shots of Liv Tyler crying to last my lifetime...I'm sure there are more to come...

PJ developed tension in the film, then killed it the very next scene...case in point: after Frodo awakens from his dream in the beginning - after an amazing opening sequence - he tells Sam they are not alone...that is building tension...nice start...then, the very next scene we have Gollum attacking the two hobbits...PJ should have cut to the three hunters right after that remark by Frodo, used another scene of Gollum stalking Frodo and Sam to build the tension even more, then brought Gollum in in a later scene...another example of how PJ fell short in cutting this movie together...

Grima should have been written w/ more subtlety, instead of being so over the top...I also wish they had left Tolkien's language as he wrote it into the characters alone...

"Did I not counsel you to forbid his staff," is a much richer line than, "Didn't I tell you to take his staff,"...subtle differences, but differences none the less...I disagree with the "dumbing down" of language such as Tolkien used just to appease a modern day audience...

there is enough eye candy in this movie w/ Aragorn and Legolas for the ladies that the contrived and horribly out of place flashback scenes between Aragorn and Arwen are unnecessary...

Gandalf, hardly even a presence, which brings me to the ending, and the departure of this film from the book...I don't like to critique a movie straight along the lines of how it departs from the book, because a movie is a separate artistic vision, and should be treated as such...however, in this case, taking the ending this moving into account, they would have been better served to keep it like the book for two main reasons:

Gandalf was a major presence in the TT book because of his confrontation w/ Saruman, and his going off w/ Pippin and the Palantir in the end...also, the fact that Pip and Merry are separated from one another at the end of TT continues the theme of the fellowship fracturing from FotR...Frodo and Sam are also separated at the end of TT, the book, further continuing this theme...

also, the fact that Faramir sees, with his own eyes, Frodo trying to turn the ring over to one of the Nazgul, only to have Sam stop him, makes Faramir's decision to let Frodo go w/ the ring ludicrous...this says that Faramir is putting his faith in Sam, and Sam alone, because he just saw Frodo try to give the ring away...how does he know Frodo won't try and do it again? I assume we are supposed to believe the Faramir let the hobbits go because he saw the corrupting influence of the ring on Frodo, and heard about its influence on Boromir, but I don't buy that Faramir would think the ring was safer in the hands of Frodo, Sam, and Gollum instead of behind the walls of Gondor...

in short, PJ's craftsmanship left much to be desired in this picture, when you look at what he accomplished w/ FotR...the script he had to work w/ was incredibly weak and full of holes...there is so much MORE potential in this movie that we did not see on screen, even when you look at the scenes that were shot, and how they were cut together...could have done better in that department...

the best thing about this film is the Gollum character...the CGI on him was the best I've ever seen in film, blowing Stars Wars away, and the way his character developed - the only character to develop in this film - was done well...I liked to see the interplay between the two sides of his personality, which was not played up as such in the novels...stragely enough, this is the part of the film I was most worried about before I sat down in the theatre...

PJ should have cut out the unnecessary warg rider scene, Aragorn falling off the cliff, and the flashbacks of Arwen, put Shelob in this movie, and ended it w/ the Fellowship fractured even more than they were fractured at the end of FotR...

the story was there, the script wasn't...
the cinematography was there, the editing wasn't...
the acting was there, but again, the script wasn't...
the special effects were there, the music wasn't...

there is a much, much better film out there for The Two Towers than what PJ put on screen...Fellowship pretty much achieved its potential, this movie falls far short of doing that...