Subject: The Two Towers moview review
X-Copyright0: Copyright 2002 Graydon Saunders
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This review is something people might very plausibly perfer to read after they've seen the movie, if they intend to do so; it is not a positive review, and it goes on at nitpicky length about details of the movie.

"It is ever so with the things that men begin: there is a frost in Spring or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise" (Gimli son of Gloin, :The Return of the King:)

In a way, this is a very silly review to write, since the sum of my thought is that I am really pleased I didn't pay for the ticket, and while I know that it would be fairer for me to go see the movie again before I post this, in all sooth I do not want to do so.

There's a lot that is visually good; the material culture of the Rohirrim, the design of the ents, the clothes of just about everybody, Smeagol/Gollum as an effect. There is much -- the entirety of Frodo, Sam, and Gollum's journey, the pursuit of the Uruk-hai, the meeting of Merry and Pippin with Treebeard, Wormtongue and Eowyn -- that is done very well.

The difficulty is that there is a great deal else that is just plain stupid.

Eomer giving horses without Aragorn declaring himself is stupid.

Theoden's explicit exorcism, both louder and less impressive than the version of the text, is perhaps tolerable, but the bit of kung-fu movie in the background while Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli keep Wormtongue's toughs away from Gandalf while Theoden is thrashing and slamming in his high seat as the exorcism -- Theoden is explicitly possessed by Saruman -- progresses and Hama and the riders in Edoras look on, impassive, is stupid beyond redemption.

Eomer being banished and gathering the Westfold men and his own household to show up at Helm's Deep in the morning after Gandalf finds him, avoiding all question of who Erkenbrand is and so on, is fine in principle, one of the necessary simplifications of adaptation to a visual medium.

It removes the interplay between Aragorn and Eomer during the defense, though, which is pushing rather far the sort of simplification books must suffer when converted into movies, and it converts Eomer to a bit part, one whose actions have no particular presented motivation.

Much else looked right and happened for all the wrong reasons.

Theoden wishes to avoid war; well, where are all the riders, if Rohan is not at war already? No one ever explains this to us, or why there isn't a scatter of fleeing armed men from Westfold, or why the assault from Isengard is apparently a complete surprise, or why Theodred was ambushed, rather than killed in battle covering the Fords of Isen; there is no sense or ordering to events as we are given them.

Elrond is shown more wrongly than I can quickly express, and then he apparently lets a great force -- that he needs himself to defend Rivendell! -- go to Rohan, for no very explicable reason, since he was saying that all the elves of Rivendell were leaving Middle Earth _right away_, and we do not see him change his mind, or know if there is some fashion of rebellion on Arwen's part, of just what. This is simply not Elrond, not even one whom the brain eater has got; it is purely against statements in the text that the Last Alliance was just that, and an alliance in arms could not be again. (And Tolkien considered such a thing, in early drafts, and rejected it; this is not a plausible alternative, this is something directly against the intent of the text.)

The whole Aragorn and Arwen retroactive sub-plot doesn't work at all; Aragorn's inconstancy, and the cause of it -- Elrond's flat prohibition to Arwen -- are so extremely wrong it's difficult to express. His general bewilderment with Arwen is pretty solidly wrong, too, but for Elrond Half-Elven, mighty among Elves and Men, to have declared that his daughter and all his people will leave for Valinor _while the war of the Ring is scarcely begun_, forbidding her to marry Aragorn _even should he achieve the Kingship of Gondor and Arnor_, is wrong beyond anything excusable by the needs of adaptation; it is precisely backwards, and a great slight to Elrond, who proved in the end wiser than Thingol.

Somehow, Liv Tyler's Arwen sails through all of this in a state of serene certainty; she knows what she wants, even when sorrowing, and like Luthien she will defy her father to get it, but the Aragorn we are shown, who suddenly is wearing the gift of a women denied him beyond the circles of the world rather than the pledge of his betrothed and who is apparently eager to consider forgetting the previous seventy years of devotion until news comes to him -- why only _now_, onsidering that the news comes to him by immaterial means? -- that Arwen has not left after all, doesn't seem worth the effort.

Helm's Deep, oh, gods.

Holding a door with your hands, with a bunch of friends like a rugger scrum as it's being hit with a battering ram; Aragorn and Gimli flinging _just_ themselves, from a height, into a mass of Uruk-hai. Being hauled up to the ramparts on a rope in the middle of a furious battle, and not being shot at once. Charging on horseback from _inside a building_, through doors and passages barely large enough for one horse, against alert opposition some of whom are armed with pole arms. Aragorn having apparently been awake continuously for a week. Two untamped barrels of what we are shown in Isengard as black gunpowder going off like half a ton of carefully placed blasting jelly. (It's a beautifully done explosion; I could wish most other movies did their explosion effects half so well. It just doesn't work as the consequence of what we were -- unnecessarily -- shown to be its cause.) Legolas missing _twice_, solely for stupid dramatic effect, and not one other archer having noticed Aragorn screaming about the sprinting fuse.

I mean, here we have a white painted orc, sprinting with a huge silver fizzy-sputtering torch toward the wall; we have Aragorn screaming 'kill him!' to Legolas, and Legolas -- who we have been shown unerringly shooting orcs in the eye a hundred yards away, uphill, in the dark of Moria -- missing a fatal shot twice, despite the location of the hits as shown being ones which would do much more harm than they are shown to do. (There are major nerve clusters and arteries on either side of the hollow of the throat where those arrows hit.) No one _else_ seems to think it was a good idea to shoot at that orc, despite the white paint and the fizzy torch and the aura of evil purpose, or Aragorn screaming; I cannot imagine why anyone making the movie thought it was a good idea to have that orc there at all.

Three hundred people to hold half a mile of wall, we are told. That wasn't enough elves marching in, and that sure wasn't three hundred people. (Three hundred? Where is the valor of Rohan?)

Elves marching in? The people of Rohan say of the Grey Company "They are Elvish wights. Let them go where they belong, into the dark places, and never return. The times are evil enough." They're suddenly entirely plussed to have the host of elves in the armor of the Elder Days -- that the Elrond of the text says he dosn't have -- show up to defend them? They're practically blase about it.

Theoden's characterization never coming close to working as a kindly old man; no hospitality, no generosity, only anger. Like Aragorn's fecklessness, this stops being interpretation and starts being terribly wrong, as the things he fears are not the right things.

He does quote "where now is the horse and the rider", oh yes, but not all of it -- the second, third, and fourth lines are plausibly lost to the needs of compression, but not the last two, for their loss changes a lament to a council of despair.

The bizarre dichotomy between Aragorn's status with the elves -- they cheerfully take his military orders -- and his apparent total obliviousness to his role as Heir of Isildur, and no one in Rohan ever asking who he is, is troubling, too, but among all these things else it is a small thing.

Treebeard and the ents deciding *hastily* to attack Isengard; worse, they make the wrong deliberate choice and it's suddenly all right because they get angry and do what the hobbits want after seeing the devastation around Isengard? Devastation which is a surprise to Treebeard?

I can live with the absence of Huorns at Helm's Deep, though I do not like it; I can live with the anemic assault of the Ents on Isengard, a far and faint cry of what had Merry and Pippin lie on the ground and stuff their cloaks in their ears. I can't live with it mattering to the thinking of the Ents what the hobbits say. Or with Merry being able to trick Treebeard, or with Treebeard not knowing what was happening to those trees, or a whole lot else. These things are stupidity to no very obvious purpose.

That sequence loses -- and this is of a piece with Jackson not understanding elves -- the entire notion that there are things older, wiser, and greater than men in the world, and the departure of those things and the eventual loss of the memory of those things being one of the great unavoidable tragedies of the ending of the age.

Without that loss, it might be a fair tale, but it is the wrong tale; some other ladle-full of the Soup of Stories, oddly spiced.

Faramir! What the hell did they think they were doing with Faramir, and winged Nazgul, and gods know what else? The Faramir of the text is a stern man, and masterful, but one who said of the Ring that he would not pick it up if he found it lying in the road, and abode by that, a man wise enough to see for himself what fate might find the brother whom he loved in the presence of the Ring.

(I will leave aside a Nazgul knowing that the Ring was at Osgiliath; it might well have been presumed to have gone into Gondor, to Minas Tirith, and hastened the assault, a thing that can be accepted as not harming the intent of the text.)

It's a great pity.

It is too modern a view; Jackson believes in the fundamental equality of all persons, that nobility is an accident of birth, and that the least can advise the greatest, and in Middle Earth, the first two of these things are not always so.

This is why his Gollum works so well, for Gollum and Smeagol _are_ modern, along with Frodo and Sam a whole modern person in parts that can argue; that part of the tale, that consideration of personal moral choice and individual duty, is excellently well done.

It is the impersonal moral choice, the choice of lords and kings for their people as well as themselves, the choice of the people to trust and to follow, that is not done well at all; this is why the Aragorn we are shown is a dismal muddle, the image of Theoden hostile erratic, death-seeking, and utterly lacking in gravitas and generosity -- and he should show it, there should be buckets with the setting provided, and it just is not there at all -- and why Elrond is so actively wrong.

Oh, and whose utterly cone-headed idiocy was making the horn of Helm a _material artifiact_? Or for putting a vaguely classical statue of a man with a literal hammer there, to stand for Helm the Hammerhand?

There is also, objectionably and culpably, the introduction of dialog on the part of Sauruman concerning the machinery of war and industry, a treatment of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien's supposed distaste for industry and taste for pastoralism, the inclusion of (bad) Tolkien _criticism_ into the film interpretation of his work as though it were canon.

His distaste, eloquently set forth, was for possessiveness, a confusion between self and other, and the desire for power over other wills and things; this is made plain in "On Fairy Stories", and it is plain enough in :The Lord of the Rings: should you read with care.

The Shire has an early nineteenth century level of technology, at the very least; fine fast pony traps, clear glass for windows, many kinds of weaving, complex water mills, relatively inexpensive bricks, cheap paper, enough books for book cases and book borrowing among the affluent, a broad variety of food, and even the nitwits who accuse the work of being in intention Luddite agree that the Shire is presented as a good place.

The ability to build Orthanc and the walls of Minas Tirith and the old roads, 'before the power and the craft of Numenor waned in exile', is given as a good thing, and the loss of that power and craft is an ill thing to have happened, yet such craft and ability is surely both technology and industry.

An elf of Lorien is sorrowful that they did not know Sam was interested in rope making, 'for we could have taught you much'; Gimli is regretful that so many of the metal-working secrets of his ancestors are lost, and proud of the stoneworking being done that betters their skill.

It is power to compel, the power over other hearts and wills, and all that serves such ends, that is objectionable in the text, not craft or industry of itself. Even when the hobbits of the Shire object to the rebuilt Sandyman's mill, they do it on grounds of it being destructive (and uneccesary for their real needs, and poorly built), not on grounds that it is a mill. There was a mill there before, and they had rather it be replaced by a better one, if it needs to be replaced at all.

So Sauruman's statements become false to the intent of the text; Sauruman as he was written desired the Ring, desired control over everything in Middle Earth, and built the power and industry of Isengard to that end, to conquer and to rule; even the bad imagining of being for something, of industry and brutal order, he was not save as it served that end of compulsion.

There is too much of this, too many little visual tropes of Hollywood buddy flicks, too much of an ambition to present what the text means and not to be an interpretation of the tale in film, from which the viewer may take their own meaning.

I very much wanted to like this movie; I am grieved by it instead.

Thank you. You hit the nail on the head. I, a devoted Tolkien follower, have waited all my life for his books to be made into a movie, and now find myself wishing it would not have happened.It is not simply the fact that major changes were made to a book that took YEARS to write and minutes to change with a stroke of a pen, but Jackson and his writers clearly had no idea of how to bring the characters from the books, to the screen.For example: Gimli is made out to be the comic relief where virtually every line he says gets a laugh. He is anything but this. He is a fierce, well accomplished warrior with royal lineage. Gandolf is reduced to someone who is somewhat capable with a sword ( I will leave it at that). Sam is the only person (ever)in the books who has had possession of the ring and not been tempted, or corrupted by it. In the movie they do nothing to show this, or even to show that he is also a ringbearer, if but for a time.

Wow, the fighter of Gondor are wimps in the movie.

Where are the Dunedain?

The Palantir looked good. Wonder if the audiance knew what it was? Aragorn did, in the book

I guess Tolkien wasted his time writing the battle of the Pellenor fields like he did. After all, why do you need the knights of Dol Amroth, or the Dunedain when you have the undead to simply crush everything in their path in the movie.

Well, I could go on and on but it would turn into a book. Can't wait to read your review on the Return of the King

Thank you. You hit the nail on the head. I, a devoted Tolkien follower, have waited all my life for his books to be made into a movie, and now find myself wishing it would not have happened.It is not simply the fact that major changes were made to a book that took YEARS to write and minutes to change with a stroke of a pen, but Jackson and his writers clearly had no idea of how to bring the characters from the books, to the screen.For example: Gimli is made out to be the comic relief where virtually every line he says gets a laugh. He is anything but this. He is a fierce, well accomplished warrior with royal lineage. Gandolf is reduced to someone who is somewhat capable with a sword ( I will leave it at that). Sam is the only person (ever)in the books who has had possession of the ring and not been tempted, or corrupted by it. In the movie they do nothing to show this, or even to show that he is also a ringbearer, if but for a time.

Wow, the fighter of Gondor are wimps in the movie.

Where are the Dunedain?

The Palantir looked good. Wonder if the audiance knew what it was? Aragorn did, in the book

I guess Tolkien wasted his time writing the battle of the Pellenor fields like he did. After all, why do you need the knights of Dol Amroth, or the Dunedain when you have the undead to simply crush everything in their path in the movie.

Well, I could go on and on but it would turn into a book. Can't wait to read your review on the Return of the King

i am greatly disturbed by your response to the movie. i am writing this only to offer a helping hand, and i speak in the kindest tone. i have read the books three times as well (just in the last two years), and the hobbit and the silmarillion and so forth... and i still think that the lord of the rings movie is among the best ever made. it is not the book, but it is to other movies what the book is to other books.

somewhere along the way you seem to have forgotten that this is just a movie. a movie cannot be a book and a book cannot be a movie, unless you would like to sit in a theatre for months on end (i would greatly enjoy that too, to see the book represented to the tee), but it will not happen. while characters may be the most important element in a book, because the settings and actions have leeway in your head, in a movie there is so much more that has to be presented. it cannot only be enlightening, it cannot only be entertaing, it can not only be emotionally moving, it must be all of these... and some aspects will lose out to the increasing of others, but so what? .hello, movie???

you, and all critics or people who fancy themselves so, have an inability to enjoy this movie not because of the changes from the book to film, but because you lack an ability that is needed enjoy the movie, or any movie, to full potential. that is momentary empathy. instead of watching the movie from the outside as a production and judging how it was made, try becoming involved with the story presented to you. put yourself in the mindframe of a character in the story and every problem disappears. you do not remeber that you have read the books, or that you have seen the movie a thousand times over, or what is about to happen next... because the story unfolds before your eyes new and fresh everytime you watch it. what was once funny is funny again, and you will jump again at quick scares, not only this, but every movie becomes a divine experience, an emotional massage, if you will. (except comedies, it doesn't work with them for somee reason). you need to drop your beliefs, morals, memory, and personality at the opening credits and let the movie control you while it lasts, and i guarantee that you will not think this, or any movie, is bad. ... except maybe justin and kelly. it is basically a process of letting yourself be completely open minded, which we should be everyday, but it is a lot harder than it sounds and it does take practice.

with that said, let's try an experiment,
just for pretends sake and a different perspective, imagine for a second (or 9:20 hours if you think you can endure that long) that there was no book. pretend mr. jackson himself thought up this whole story in a dream and made the movie and dropped it into movie history as something nobody has ever seen before (which he kind of did). even if the characters are not what tolkien wrote, they are still characters, and are still interesting on their own merit (although i do realize that not as many can get full attention or development), and have very relatable feelings, which makes the process described above even more enjoyable.
there is no doubt in my mind that this same process works just as well or better with books, but would be much harder over such a long time. i atually did not begin to start trying this until i had seen ROTK for the first time. i had seen FOTR without ever having heard of the books and was able to the above with ease, but with the following two i was troubled and could not decide whether to like them as movies or despise them as adaptations. then i made a conscious decision to try it throughout the whole trilogy, and it was one of the most unbelievable and enlightening experiences in my life (just like when i had first seen FOTR)... and it didn't matter that i had seen the first two a thousand times before.

i am a person who is greatly disgusted with the abuse of this tool of endless possibilities (the internet) to do nothing but complain about movies. complaining is a waist of time and intelligence. this process of momentary empathy i have described is a baby step to living a happier life that i think everybody should embrace rather than trying to appear smart by using as many big words as they can whilst demeaning artistic endeavours of various individual visionaries merely because one refuses to comprehend the intentions of said visionaries. dichotomy. paeleantologist. siphilissophisticated. mispel.

simply put, there is no real problem with this movie. they are problems that you are making up and if it happens to you with movies, it may just as easily happen in real life, which is why i want to help. i guess i just want the whole world to rotate their shoulders, lean your seat back, and enjoy whatever plate is being offered, because it IS BEING OFFERED to you. cutting the connection between Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and Jackson's Lord of the Rings is just the first step. do you really want to let yourself sit in an uncomfortable seat for any lenthg of time just to be unhappy? do really want to let yourself be unhappy about things that don't really affect your day to day life?

one last afterthought... for internet bitchiness's sake, if there was anything that Tolkien was clearly against in his writings, it is sensless, pointless, useless hate (as all hate is) that you have displayed here.

Tolkien was obviously an educated man and who would find it in himself to not really care if said changes were made for the purpose of ultimately telling a story with the same range of emotions and enlightenment. that is all.

Obviously Mike hasn't read Tolkien's own letters on the subject, when a studio presented him with the outline for a film version of LOTR, in which he gets *very* upset at the idea of a crass treatment of the characters, at turning the plot into gibberish, and at losing all the themes of the story and replacing them with battle after senseless battle.

He goes on for pages and pages of being upset, in very funny and sarcastic detail, commenting on their scriptment outline and explaining how they *should* cut things and rearrange things, instead, without damaging LOTR. It almost seems like Jackson, Boyens, Walsh read what he advised - and then went and deliberately did the opposite, as if thumbing their noses at The Professor.

At this point, really it's *false advertising* for PJ and friends to call it "J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings"....

Nor do I think we have any obligation to accept whatever slop a moviemaker (or other fabricator) tries to sell us as good art, either. We were promised a banquet, and we got cold oatmeal instead.

(And please, if you're going to make long posts, Mike, learn how to spell and punctuate before you start giving orders to people who disagree with you. It won't make the authoritarian nature of your orders any less objectionable, but at least they'll be easier to read!)

I believe Lord of the Rings III is the geatest movie. it doesn't happen very often when a screen version of a book is as powerful as the book itself... It's more than words can say, and it deserves the best of awards.

I personally thought it was brilliant and movie. I can't wait for the Extended Version of ROTK, so I won't miss out any scenes that were edited due to length.

I think that Lord of the Rings III the best movie of them three. It was just incredible.

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