FilmBlather.com

"I come back to you now, at the turn of the tide."

With The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, what promises to be the greatest movie franchise in history comes into its own, which is impressive because the first installment was itself a great film, and the subsequent DVD release of the extended version, a masterpiece. To all the philistines who whined that The Fellowship of the Ring didn't have a pay-off (are you listening, Roeper?): here it is, and I defy you to watch without being swept away by the grandeur of its storytelling, without having your heart skip a beat at the sheer mythical vastness of its imagery. Whether or not one has ever been within one hundred yards of a Tolkien volume is irrelevant; this is filmmaking on an unparalleled scale, stirring, rousing, technically perfect.

There are distinct, sometimes jarring differences between this film and its predecessor, and we might as well get them out of the way. It's markedly darker, as second installments of trilogies are wont to be. It is much more plot-driven than character-driven, the storyline now fractured into three distinct threads, though director/my hero Peter Jackson somehow still finds room for charming, funny, sometimes touching individual character moments. The "homey" feeling of the first movie is all but gone: Middle-Earth is no longer a pleasant and beautiful place, and though its spanning vistas are still impressive, they're cold now, and menacing. The Shire is nowhere to be found, and this fantasy landscape has ceased to be a place I would like to visit on vacation.

This time around, there is no helpful prologue to ease us into the action; Jackson simply lurches forward and doesn't stop for two hours and fifty-nine minutes, picking up precisely where Fellowship left off. Frodo (Elijah Wood) and Sam (Sean Astin) are off on their long, arduous road into the heart of Mordor, the ring beginning to weigh more and more heavily on the former's heart. They are led by a creature named Gollum, completely corrupted by the power of the ring, waging an internal war that manifests itself literally as an argument with himself; more on him later.

Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), the dwarf Gimli (John Rhys-Davies) and the elf Legolas (Orlando Bloom) are tracking a band of orcs who have carried off faithful hobbits Merry (Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd). They run into Gandalf (Ian McKellen), now resurrected as Gandalf the White after what everyone thought was death at the hands of the Balrog in the first episode. He tells them to head for Rohan, where Wormtongue (Brad Dourif), an agent of the corrupt wizard Saruman (Christopher Lee), poisons the mind of Theoden, the great king of men, and where Saruman's army has set its sights.

Its a barrage of names and places, I know, and it would sound intimidating to anyone not intimately familiar with Tolkien's work. One of Jackson's greatest achievement with this monumental undertaking is how elegantly he juggles the book's epic plots and themes; not for an instant does he give the impression of going down the list of significant events with a checklist, nor does he indulge the temptation to dwell on the author's unimaginably complex mythology, conveying its gist without overwhelming us with detail.

The Two Towers establishes an effective rhythm, hopping from one storyline to another without creating confusion, making the legend live on the screen with breathtaking clear-headedness and lucidity. The reason I love epic fantasy tales like The Lord of the Rings is that they whisk you away to an entirely new world of an author's imagination, but that feeling is rarely translated to the screen; here, we genuinely feel like the fate of an entire universe is at stake. It's not our universe, but that doesn't make it any less personal.

It goes without saying at this point that the movie is a technical marvel. At the forefront of its many accomplishments is the creation of Gollum, who sent my jaw lurching to the floor every time he appeared on screen. Forget Jar-Jar Binks and Dobby the House-Elf; for a glimpse at what CGI can do, look hither. Gollum, voiced by Andy Serkis (who also provided the model for his bodily movements), isn't just lifelike, he is more human than most of the characters who have graced the screen this year. Tolkien evoked pity for him; Jackson and his team of artists evoke sympathy, and make us understand him. Here, at last, is a compelling, even frightening, portent of an all-digital Hollywood.

I don't want to go into great detail about the battle for Helm's Deep, but I will say that it is likely to go down in the annals as one of the most impressive battle scenes ever put to celluloid. Like the prologue of Fellowship, this is another, much subtler example of downright incredible CGI: Jackson creates an army almost entirely from scratch. Incredible.

These movies are everything Tolkien's masterpiece deserves, and maybe more than that. They stand as independent works of art even while they are inextricably attached to, and enamored of, their source material. Watching, I felt that this is what cinema was intended to be: grand in scope and feeling, stunning on every level, transporting the audience to a long, long time ago...