*** (out of ****)
Starring Elijah Wood, Ian McKellan, Viggo Mortensen, Orlando Bloom, Christopher Lee, Liv Tyler, John Rhys-Davies, Brad Dourif, Billy Boyd, Bernard Hill, Liv Tyler, Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett, and Sean Astin
Directed by Peter Jackson & written for the screen by Jackson, Frances Walsh, Phillipa Boyens, and Stephen Sinclair, from the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien, with cinematography by Andrew Lesnie and music by Howard Shore
2002 PG13
Here is a movie that accomplishes almost nothing. It takes three hours but, if it were written in the style of the Old Testament, would take about two lines. To wit:
Abram took his wife Sarai, his brother’s son Lot, all the possessions that they had accumulated, and the persons they had acquired in Haran, and they set out for the land of Canaan. When they came to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land as far as the sacred place of Shechem, by the terebinth of Moreh. (Gen 12:4-6)
Replace Abram and his homeboys with Frodo et al., replace the Holy Land with the land of Flibbity-Floo, throw in a couple dozen sword fights, and, presto, you have “The Two Towers.” I really enjoyed “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” but it was essentially a feature-length video game, in which Our Heros set out from home to one destination, then to another, then another, then another, and fight stuff along the way, and haven’t finished where they’re going by the end of the film. “The Two Towers” is more of the same, except Our Heros don’t start off at home, and they still don’t finish where they’re going by the end. Aside from that, everything else is about the same: different races learn to put aside their differences in order to fight evil together, we think someone who falls off a cliff is dead but he’s not, someone blows a horn, and there are some truly exciting sword fights between here and there.
Set in the mythical land of Middle Earth, still stunningly portrayed by New Zealand, the Ring of Power still needs to be destroyed before the evil wizard Sauron gets his hands on it and uses it to conquer the world (since he’s just a disembodied, unblinking eyeball, he can’t really get his hands on anything, but we’ll tolerate the metaphor). Only the little Hobbit Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood) can resist its evil allure and hurl it into the volcano where it was forged. In “Fellowship of the Ring,” he was joined on his quest by different species—a couple humans, an elf, a dwarf, a wizard, and three other reluctant Hobbits—but misadventure has separated them, leaving only Frodo and one other Hobbit named Sam (Sean Astin) to complete the journey through the blackened wasteland to the volcano. All is not well for Frodo and Sam; not only is Frodo’s ability to resist the wicked ring weakening, but they have formed an uneasy alliance with a creature known as Golem (or Gollum or Gollem or perhaps some trendy Celtic spelling like Goyllym), who was once like them but corrupted by the Ring. He has sworn to take them to the volcano but may not be trustworthy.
Meanwhile we catch up with the other survivors of the Fellowship: Aragorn the ruggedly handsome human (Viggo Mortensen), Legolas the laconic elf (Orlando Bloom), Gimli the dwarf with an inferiority complex (John Rhys-Davies), and Gandalf the wizard (Sir Ian McKellan), who didn’t really die at the end of the previous film. Sauron has begun his attack on the civilized world with thousands upon thousands of monsters, and the Fellowship must convince the king (Bernard Hill) of the Blonde People to fight back against Sauron. The Blonde People live in a place called Owen or McGoohan or something, and in the next installment of “The Lord of the Rings” they’ll probably unite against evil with the Fair-Haired People and the dwarves, since they’ve teamed up with the elves and the talking trees by the end of “The Two Towers.”