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The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Review by Adrian Hyland At the risk of upsetting the seemingly unshakeable consensus of opinion that sees us Kiwis unwilling to criticise the holy grail of New Zealand cultural achievement, I must say that while "The Two Towers" represents an immense logistical accomplishment, and puts its creators at the forefront of CGI filmmaking internationally, as a cinema experience it left me completely unmoved. I thought the film failed to deepen or intensify any of the elements that were introduced in "The Fellowship of the Ring", and instead laboured ahead with mechanical storytelling that left me trying to remember what its characters were trying to achieve, and while the first film may have reintroduced its own brand of old-fashioned movie magic to the cinema, the second in the trilogy is so bland and humourless that even Tolkien lovers may find it enervating. "The Two Towers" really plods; there are no moments in which you become caught up in the epic ambitions of the characters and swept away on a tide of emotion. It doesn't help that Howard Shore's music is undistinguished, and there are too many instances in which a panoramic wide shot of ant-like human figures, traversing the majesty of the surrounding landscape, is followed jarringly by a shot of the travellers arriving at their destination and knocking on the front door. As storytelling goes it's pretty uninspired and it makes the movie feel earthbound, as though the filmmakers simply wanted to impart as much information in three hours as possible. This approach makes it hard for the actors to transcend the expository nature of the lines they are given, and one wonders how they were directed, as there is not a trace of spontaneity in any of the performances. Having read about the 'star quality' of Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn, and his soon-to-be legion of female admirers, I was surprised to find myself unmoved by the way his hair moved in slow motion, and I don't recall Aragorn having anything particularly memorable to say. It's not that the actors in "The Two Towers" do bad work, it just seems that neither character detail nor the performances of the actors has been given top priority. The only character who convincingly suggests a past is the CGI creation Gollum, and it seems as though the conflict that is so absent from all the other characters has been injected rather irresponsibly into this little blue goblin, with the result being that I wished someone would perform Middle Earth's first goblin lobotomy. Gollum may be the most impressive CGI creation yet; he's comfortably the most indecisive. "The Two Towers" keeps you at a distance, because there's nothing to draw you in; the attempts at humour are restricted to patronising chuckles at the expense of the dwarf (couldn't someone have given Aragorn a wedgie just to lighten things up a bit?), and there is nothing personal about the way it is shot and edited, nothing to suggest a sensibility at work. Peter Jackson may have the persistence and single-mindedness of a visionary, and his attention to detail (in the production design, at least) is impressive, but this film feels ground out, uninspired, and in its three hours there is not even a moment's surprise. — Adrian Hyland studied post-production at South Seas Film & Television School. He now works as a news editor at TV3. |