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As a longtime reader and teacher of Tolkien, I had expected to like this movie even less than the first of Peter Jackson's grand-scale adaptations of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. I had assigned a grade-inflated B to Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring, since I thought it succeeded as a film while failing severely in attempting to render the moral and religious character of Tolkien's epic novel. I had also been warned that, in this second installment, Jackson takes radical liberties with Tolkien's text, and this proved to be true. To my surprise, however, I liked the film version of The Two Towers, even though Jackson seems to have dropped nearly all desire to remain faithful to the spirit of Tolkien's book. The result is an action film that works, yet its very accomplishment raises serious questions about the relation of the visual image to the aural word.
Jackson's many deviations from Tolkien's narrative serve to move the film along at a rapid clip. And once again the natural scenery is so magnificent that the New Zealand tourist industry must surely be ecstatic. The film also succeeds, in one of its rare moments of religious insight, in showing the odd resemblance between the two enemy wizards. Saruman the White is the once-chief wizard who has become utterly corrupted by seeking to use the demonic Ring of coercive power for the accomplishment of alleged good. Gandalf the Grey, by contrast, is the suffering and dying wizard who has been resuscitated and utterly transfigured by his faithfulness. Yet in his hard-won splendor and authentic spiritual power, Gandalf has taken on the features that were meant for Saruman. So close yet so infinitely far apart, Jackson shows in accord with Tolkien, are the states of glory and misery.
The film's computer-generated images are also extremely well done—above all in the character of Sméagol, the morally and physically withered hobbit who once possessed the Ring of power and who remains obsessed with getting it back. Renamed Gollum because of his greedy desire for fresh fish and his constant throat-muttering, he is here depicted as a terribly emaciated creature with huge, haunted eyes and apelike movements. Such, Jackson reveals, are the dehumanizing effects of evil on body and soul alike. Yet there is a tiny window of freedom letting a sliver of light into Gollum's closed soul, and it has been opened by Frodo's gracious treatment of him. The movie's best moments come when Gollum undergoes a fierce crisis of conscience about his mad desire for the Ring. These finely depicted inner debates reveal the hobbit's true and false selves—the suppressed moral voice of Sméagol, who could still repent and be redeemed, and the corrupted Gollum, who remains entrapped in his lust for the Ring.
How shall we deal with this strange anomaly—that the movie's most convincing character is a computer creation? Though Gollum's movements were acted by Andy Serkis, the shrunken hobbit's actual features were digitized. Will there be a separate Academy Awards category for the Best CGI Character?
The clash between technics and art becomes most acute in the culminating battle of Helm's Deep. Jackson offers a gripping depiction of the horrors and confusions of war, whether ancient or modern. The thousands of combatants—as Saruman's monstrous warriors are marshaled into huge phalanxes making their assault on the final outpost of Rohan—require no deadly suspension of disbelief. It's a magnificent spectacle.
Aristotle regarded spectacle as the last and least of drama's essential elements—a crowd-pleasing device that mustn't overwhelm the play's central moral and spiritual conflict. Jackson not only allows spectacle to overwhelm the agon of Tolkien's book, but seems deliberately to have done so. Tolkien describes the actual combat at Helm's Deep ever so sparingly—with minimal attention to violence and gore—while Jackson turns the book's ten-page account into a 30-minute climax. Yet even if at too great a length, Jackson catches the unbowed heroism of Tolkien's courageous Company. With undaunted valor they fight against enemies who are far more numerous and unthinkably more vicious. Jackson's cinematic mastery captures both the virile strength and the exceptional virtue of Tolkien's small band of warriors. They display the gallantry that Tolkien admired in ancient heroic cultures and that he used as a model for much of The Lord of the Rings.
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