Well, it took about a week, but I was finally able to squeeze The Two Towers out of HBOMax. There have been thunderstorms around here lately and I think it interferes with my internet, which is wifi from a box. Yet, all my other streaming services worked well enough. Even The Criterion Channel worked fine if I set the quality to 520. But when I got halfway through The Two Towers: Extended Edition, the part where the wargs attack, the player stuttered and finally froze up completely. Over the next few days, I tried to pick it back up but could only get two or three minutes at a time. Last night it finally let me watch the rest but, sadly, the spell was kind of broken. The emotional impact of a film is of course modified by whether or not you watch it piecemeal. Not always in a bad way--I like to prolong the experience of some movies by splitting them into episodes. Oddly enough, as long as they are and kind of episodic, the Lord of the Rings movies are not among those I like to split up. Peter Jackson's filmmaking style is so much about flow from one scene to the next that breaking them up feels wrong.
So I enjoyed the first half of the film much more, being able to get swept up in Jackson's pacing and arrangement of scenes. The casting continued to be spot on. Brad Dourif as Wormtongue is a great example of an actor elevating the material. He doesn't hold back on the delivery, even making little hissing sounds. Yet he suggests depth and complexity not present in the dialogue that helps make him captivating. The screenplay gets some credit, giving some dialogue of Gandalf's from the book to Wormtongue so he can have a moment of genuine insight into Eowyn (Miranda Otto). The dialogue is still beautiful but now it also helps establish his threat and his humanity.
Andy Serkis makes Gollum age very well. The cgi has started to look dated though these movies never did have the most seamless computer effects. But it's the authenticity of emotion that matters and Serkis does it. I only wish Elijah Wood and Sean Astin's performances had aged as well as everyone else's. But most of the time they're good enough.
Even a lot of changes Jackson's team made that I don't like I can still understand. Like the scene where Sam cooks the rabbits. There's no way the film could do something like the version of that scene in the book, which is about the wonder of Sam creating something like the feel of Bag End right there on the edge of Mordor, just with his cooking and ordering Gollum about like a servant. There are other changes I've come to sorely lament.
It's easy to see why they did what they did with the Ents. To give Merry (Domanic Monahan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd) something to do, to add dramatic tension to the end of the movie. These things are nice in the short term but the logical integrity of the book's version makes it something you can contemplate on its own terms years later. When I watch the movie now, I just think, "How did Treebeard, a shepherd of the forest, not know Saruman (Christopher Lee) was cutting down Fangorn? How did none of the other Ents know?"
The Arwen (Liv Tyler) scenes have a beautiful tone and I love the fact that they gave Hugo Weaving the text about Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) from the end. Arwen's inner conflict over her devotion to Aragorn doesn't feel explored well enough for it to be introduced at all, though.
I do like the Ents unleashing the river on Isengard as an action sequence more than the Helm's Deep battle which feels oddly stagebound. It has too much artificial lighting. The night battle sequences on Game of Thrones definitely did it better, though, since everyone complained about it, it may not set a new standard, sadly enough.
Generally, The Two Towers is not as good as The Fellowship of the Ring, though maybe I'd feel differently if it'd streamed properly. Even if I could afford to keep HBOMax, I'm not sure if I would. Maybe after a few years when they've ironed out their technical problems and I've become a trillionaire.
No comments:
Post a Comment