The Two Towers is a stirring fantasy adventure, though Peter Jackson’s divided storylines sometimes make it lumber. Andy Serkis gives Gollum enough fear and spite to compete with the armies for our attention.
Peter Jackson gives the middle chapter of this adventure enough danger and feeling to justify its considerable length. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is engrossing, though its divided storylines occasionally make it cumbersome. It asks us to follow several journeys while the fighting grows in importance, a difficult change of emphasis to manage. At 179 minutes, the interruptions have time to register.
The surest reason to stay is Andy Serkis’s Gollum. The computer-created face is expressive enough for fear to interrupt malice without making either seem less convincing, and Serkis never makes the creature safely endearing. We felt sorry for him, and were unsettled by how readily that pity arrived. The frightened expressions keep asking for sympathy that the spite in his voice makes difficult to sustain. The ring’s capacity to damage someone becomes easier to grasp when we have to spend time with the damaged person.
Viggo Mortensen gives Aragorn the gravity needed to carry the film’s increased emphasis on action, although that emphasis sometimes pushes the hobbits too far aside. Sean Astin’s Sam supplies a welcome directness of feeling when the larger story threatens to turn everyone into a military responsibility. Astin makes concern for another person seem sufficient reason to keep going. We do not need another account of the stakes when his face has already made them clear.
Andrew Lesnie’s landscape photography makes the distances feel daunting, so the journeys retain some sense of effort even when the film is hurrying between them. Grant Major’s production design gives the inhabited places a convincing weight beside that open country. At Helm’s Deep, the solidity matters: the battle needs somewhere we believe people could defend, not simply an impressive backdrop. Jackson’s staging keeps the struggle comprehensible at a scale that could easily have reduced individual bodies to movement across the screen.
The difficulty comes in getting from one strand to another. The screenplay, by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Stephen Sinclair and Jackson, cannot always make those switches feel necessary at the moment they occur. Michael Horton’s editing maintains momentum within the action, but some returns to the other journeys feel like obligations being discharged. A quieter scene can be welcome on its own terms and still arrive just when we have settled into caring about somebody else.
Helm’s Deep repays much of that patience. Jackson lets the pressure build across the battle, and the sustained tension is more persuasive than a succession of isolated displays of force would have been. Howard Shore’s score gives the fighting weight without making it feel like a victory parade, although its solemnity can become insistent elsewhere. There is enough urgency here to justify the time spent on the battle, and enough attention to the people involved to keep us concerned about them.
Fantasy adventures often struggle to make an enormous threat feel personal. Jackson succeeds most clearly when he lets Gollum or Sam command our attention without another reminder of the wider war. We could have used more of that confidence in the quieter stretches, but the spectacle has earned its space too. Give it the full evening, and do not expect every strand to move at the same speed.
