Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

"Mordor. The one place in Middle Earth we don't want to see any closer is the one place we're trying to get to."

I suppose it is hardly surprising that, despite its great lip-service to valour, courage and self-sacrifice, Lord of the Rings should embark upon the second leg of its epic journey on such a ridiculously spineless note. The clumsily expository opening scenes, as each of the three divisions of the Fellowship breathlessly intimate where they are and why and account for Gandalf's disappearance through a frankly unforgivable use of flashback, betray a frustrating and alienating lack of respect for his audience on the part of the director, Peter Jackson, and serve as much to signpost the patronising direction of the second movie as to explain the events of the first. In short, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to The Two Towers.

I must confess to no great admiration or enthusiasm for J.R.R. Tolkien or his works. His Middle Earth was, to me, a flimsy sketch of a map, held up to a blinding light such that the clumsy silhouettes of his hands could be seen behind the scenes at all times- but I realise that there are those to whom the Shire and the lands around it were very real indeed, and it is to those happy few that Jackson's movies may very well appeal most. The physical reality of Middle Earth, as it is presented here, is beyond dispute; the scale and splendour of the enterprise is remarkable, and a credit to everyone involved. Oh, Jackson's Middle Earth is very real indeed- what is a shame is that no real people live in it.

No doubt that Ian McKellen is a very fine actor, but that he should have received an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of Gandalf in The Fellowship of the Ring is, simply put, farcical. The Two Towers has no characters to speak of, merely facades whose only identifiable character traits are the inscrutable and unmotivated pursuit of Evil, the inscrutable and unmotivated pursuit of Good or, in a couple of exceptionally complex cases, both. Indeed, it would be fair to say that our interest in the stock selection of cardboard cut-outs who share the screen is directly proportional to their level of corruption by the Ring; or, to put it another way, that Bilbo Baggins and Gollum are the only ever-so-slightly intriguing characters nearly six hours of cinema has so far offered us- and that's not saying much. Andy Serkis's Gollum is adequately realised, but if we are to talk of Academy Award nominations for him we might as well go the whole hog and retrospectively nominate Jim Carrey for The Mask- the performances are equally adept, and the characters equally complex. Similarly, Gollum's arguments with himself are well-handled, but serve no further purpose than to establish a clumsy sort of empathy between him and the audience; as psychological expositions or dissertations on morality they are no more effective than Norman Osborn's arguments with his reflection in Spider-Man. And therein lies the nub. Serkis adequately portrays a limited character in a limited way, but is being touted for Oscars and lauded to the skies for no other reason than that he does it from behind an impressive collection of computer pixels and eye-catching expressions. And thus the entire movie.

The Two Towers, as a matter of fact, has as much cinematic worth as your aunt and uncle's holiday snaps from Greece; the pictures are pretty, but there's nothing more to the slideshow than that. Lord of the Rings looks like having little more to impress us with than visuals, and we have already been slightly innured to those by near three hours of The Fellowship of the Ring. The movie has no greater driving impetus than a mawkish, unquestioning collision of Goodies with Baddies, with an alarming focus on the valour and glory of the struggle against Evil, and very little on the true horror and ugliness of war. For subtlety, style and fidelity to the grim realities of combat, death and pain, the siege at Helm's Deep is comparable to the attack of the Deadites in Army of Darkness- the "What We're Fighting For" monologues of the straggled members of the Fellowship wouldn't sound out of place in the mouths of one of the pre-match Mighty Ducks, and when poor Bernard Hill, whose performance as Théoden is one of the few that betrays any real agitation about the limitations of the character, watches the battle commence from atop the ramparts with the sombre pronouncement "So it begins." it is just one cliché too far for the discerning viewer.

It has been said that The Two Towers is darker than its predecessor, and this is probably true, insofar as it attempts to meddle with things it clearly doesn't understand. Where The Fellowship of the Ring was more or less resigned to its status as an adventure fantasy of wish-fulfillment, The Two Towers has pretensions to a significance it simply cannot attain. The manouverings of both armies and men are too crude and deterministic to have any bearing at all on real issues; one might as well hope to learn something about the human condition from watching a computer play itself at Pong. It is a shame, a crying shame -such an immense stage deserves a better performance- but, ultimately, five hours and fifty-seven minutes on, Middle Earth remains a brave new world that has no people in it.