LotR re-read: Two Towers movie re-watch

(Did the White Wizard fake-out work for any new people?)

I never read the books, but I did not realize until my second viewing, months later, that I was supposed to think Gandalf was Saruman.

Interesting, The Two Towers was my favorite of the movies.

I absolutely hated what was done to Faramir. I know Peter Jackson was trying to emphasize the overwhelming corruptive power of the ring, but the movie misses one of the main points. The whole point of the Boromir/Faramir thing is that though Boromir was perhaps the stronger warrior, Faramir had the nobility of the ancient men of Westernese, and thus did not desire the power the ring gave.

This I think was symptomatic of what I think was one of the major flaws of the movies. It seemed like every character that showed true character and nobility had to have that aspect of their character diminished.

Aragorn has a wimpy not sure I really want to be king unless I get forced into it sort of attitude.

Not much difference between Faramir and his brother.

Galadriel comes across as sort of freaky.

Elrond is a crabby old elf.

Theoden sometimes seems bitter and spiteful.

Don’t get me wrong I still loved the movies, though Two Towers was bar far my least favorite of the three. I just don’t understand why Jackson felt such a need to diminish any character that showed any amount of nobility in their character.

I watched the movie again recently, and I have to admit that the slowness of it (and the big mountains, and long helicopter shots) are totally part of the pleasure for me, because at many moments its not so much the action, as appreciating the scope of it all that I enjoyed, (this of course does not aply to the battle scene, and my god, I thought it was longer to)

Now that I think of it, maybe the relatively contemplative first part gives it a slighlty intelectual varnish that make the misguided shield surfing and dwarf jokes easier to swallow

Seeing it again I was suprised to notice that I had forgot nearly every Frodo/Sam/Gollum moments, to rember only the rohan plotline, perhaps because of my foundness for big plains and cities on top of hills ( I guess Rohan-phile is the term :) )

Not to deny that Gollum was wonderfull though, because he was.

I had read the books several years before the films came out, and when I was quite young, and so I remember the characters and the overall story foundly, but not really enought to detect all the changed plot point.

What I remember thought is that when reading at was possitivly horrified at the possibily that Eowyn could snatch Aragorn, and in the movie I was totally rooting for her, wich tells you a lot about what I thought of the two actresses performances.

The pseudo dead aragorn was horrible and puting together the dream sequence/metaphor/whatever of arwen and the comic relief of the horse is just clumsy

Though I agree with many of your reserves, I have to confess that when I saw this movie, the only feelings I had was those of a childhood dream becoming true right in front of my eyes, in a way that frankly deserved a gold medal compared to so many books adaptation out there (wich you have to admire because it’s he lord of the rings damnit!)

oh, and did I mension THE PUSHING OF THE DOUBLE DOORS!

orzelc @22: HP1 was a good example of how mechanical reproduction of the plot is not the same thing as faithfulness to the book. Not just Dumbledore’s, but every piece of whimsy that made that book so charming was surgically removed, except only the every-flavor beans. At noticing which I said to myself, “I bet they’re going to sell those,” and sure enough, they soon turned up in the stores.

Even apart from that, the film was crude and exaggerated, e.g. look at what they did to the first flying lesson.

Getting back to LOTR, Jackson (or Boyens) has indeed said that when they got too far away from the book, the storytelling suffered. And boy howdy, indeed it did.

You say that you consider Two Towers the best of the three books. This may in part be because Tolkien didn’t write LOTR as a trilogy. It’s a single novel that got published in three volumes for size and pricing reasons. So TTT doesn’t suffer from the standard “middle volume of a trilogy” syndrome.

CyricPL @21: Actually, when I write “Jackson”, consider that shorthand for “the creative team of scriptwriters Jackson-Walsh-Boyens plus Jackson in his capacity as director and any relevant assistants.”

If they couldn’t get the Elves out of the Helm’s Deep shots, all the more reason they should have stuck to the original plan and kept Arwen in. It wouldn’t have been any more of Tolkien’s story, but it wouldn’t have been any less, either, and at least it then would have been their story. As released, it isn’t anybody’s story.

In general I think of The Lord of the Rings as more of a travelogue rather than a novel – Tolkien built a world and LoTR was a vehicle to drive us around in it. In that sense I think Jackson captured it brilliantly – the locations, the sets, the costumes all capture the essence of what I imagined (just try to imagine the LoTR by Tim Burton) .

The books featured a lot of turgid dialogue, paper thin characters and unmotivated behavior, and a lot of that made it into the films. To be sure, Jackson committed plenty of sins – of which the psuedo-death of Aragorn was probably the worst. On the other hand, the role of Aragorn in the book was pretty underwritten and I really liked what they did with him overall (and the job that Viggo Mortenson did with the part).

There are a handful of iconic scenes that he manage to incorporate that really did hit the mark – and the return of Gandalf was high on that list (along with his fall in Moria). In the comments PJ says that the first few seconds of that shot have Christopher Lee’s eyes super-imposed in order to heighten the impression that its Saruman (which is a strong element of that scene in the book).

Nowadays I tend to rewatch the extras on the extended edition as much or more than the actual movies – everything about how they did the art design (hiring John Howe and Alan Lee), the costumes, the sets, the locations and the special effects is fascinating. The commentary with the screen writers is informative if you’re curious about the plot choices they made.

I walked out of the first movie thinking it was about as much as one could hope for from an adaptation, but the extended edition completely blew me away. Unfortunately this was released right before the two towers, so my impression of that movie was completely colored by my expectations for the extended version.

Kate@@@@@ Ah, but I perceive I will have to fight you for Sean Bean.

glad to hear I’m not the only one who had that impression about Arwen & Liv Tyler.

Indeed not. She’s far too young to carry off a 2000-plus-year-old woman. And I don’t mean her face, I mean her entire lack of gravitas.

So whenever I watch these movies, I fantasize that Jackson had instead cast Claudia Black in the role of Arwen. ::sigh::

I find, over all, that the overt depiction of magical moments in these movies is one of my real problems. Gandalf and Saruman’s Matrix-esque fight in the first one, and the freeing of Theoden in this one, are just Too Much. It’s really symptomatic of the use of too much CGI in a lot of movies nowadays: just because you can show it, doesn’t mean you should.

And I hate hate hate Gimli as comic relief.

Making Gimli be the Comic Relief Dwarf and the Amazingly Unbelievable Adventures of Legolas really pissed me off.

And cavalry charging down the hill into PIKES doesn’t bother anybody else?? Maybe I’ve read too many Richard Sharpe books, but I thought that horses wouldn’t charge into BAYONETS, much less pikes.

Jackson did a good job in the first movie, and I was really excited to see the rest of the movies. But his treatment of Faramir (and Denethor, in the third movie) really bothered me.

Jackson got some things right, and the stuff that’s RIGHT is pretty good. But on the whole, I find the movies almost unwatchable now. They make me angry at what MIGHT have been, if Jackson hadn’t decided to wander off and make his own movies that only tangentially touched Tolkien’s story.

Yeah, I’m cranky.

Kate @49: Well, obviously Tolkien’s intent isn’t determinative, or else how did we come to be watching this movie?

My point is that if you’re going to insult the author’s intent, you should at least be aware that that’s what you’re doing. (At the very least, when you’re dealing with a living author, you can avoid being surprised when they object, the way Julie Powell was surprised when Julia Child dismissed her.)

And that playing around with a conscious and deliberate work of art of claimed authorship in the modern mode is not the same thing as playing around with a public domain folk tale, regardless of what rules are determinative, regardless of whether you give a damn about the author of not.

My own assessment is that the first movie was rather good, TT was awful, and ROTK was — astonishingly — even worse: wretched, abysmal, or, as #34 puts it, an abomination.

What I really liked:
Gollum.

Also good:
costumes, settings, landscapes, actors. In fact, everything that wasn’t story was excellent. Except Edoras (the built part), which wasn’t convincing for me. It looked like a shepherds’ village instead of the capital of Rohan.

What I hated (much longer list):
The ents being made stupid.
Faramir being made an idiot.
Theoden in cobwebs; stupid exorcism.
Ridiculous, unneeded Aragorn fake death, wasting time, accomplishing nothing.
Embarrassing insertions concerning Arwen. I wanted to hide.

Peter Jackson seemed to have *no interest whatsoever* in character. He didn’t mind inserting the most illogical, senseless actions in the story. It was simply painful to watch. I don’t mind filmmakers making changes to a story; it makes a movie more interesting. But the changes have to make sense.

Special agreement here:
“…the way that Faramir rejects the Ring in the book is so very carefully constructed that, at least this time, I could see on what a knife’s edge it hung, and I think one could make a terrific tense piece of filmmaking out of that.”

The suspense of that scene could have been terrific. *sigh of regret*

Remove the Warg riders and shorten the battle, and the movie could have shown Gandalf’s confrontation with Saruman (in theater version). And would have made the extended release unnecessary.

“…that or he thinks she’s incredibly stupid never to have realized what loving a mortal meant…”

Stupid, no. But there’s a difference between knowing and experiencing. The most heart-piercing and tragic moment in the story of Aragorn and Arwen is when the says, faced with Aragorn’s death, “Only now do I understand the story of your people. As fools I scorned them…” etc. (I wish I had my copy with me, to quote better.)

On Arwen,

In the books, I think the implication was pretty clear that she hadn’t thought through all the implications of staying in Middle Earth and becoming mortal, and if she had, she might not have chosen the way that she did. She might have lived a couple millenia, but she hasn’t spent those years contemplating the meaning of immortality and the pluses and minuses of the mortal condition. Having Elrond try to drill into her head exactly what she was giving up and the transitory nature of what she was going to receive was exactly what she needed.

I’ll admit my bias: I never liked Arwen very much. I thought she was a pale copy of Luthian.

One of the problems is that Tolkien was writing northern European hero sagas and that is a difficult mind set for the modern film maker to get into. So what I liked about this film (and it is my favorite of the three) is what plays into the mythic hero tradition. For instance, as we first see Edoras, it is built on a hill as many castles and redoubts were. It looks very medieval, reminds me of vikings. And the music mirrors music we hear with cowboy sagas, another mythic hero.

The hero archetype is also why Aragorn is so effective in many (though not all) of the scenes. I agree that the scene of him pushing open the doors is worth the whole movie. Very heroic archetype as is the scene of Aragorn girding for battle. The scene of the king and Aragorn and the others riding through the hall at Helm’s Deep, preparing to die together in battle could be taken from any number of heroic tales and sagas. In my opinion, that scene is extremely effective and very much what Tolkien may have been striving for in his heroes’ tale.

Where the film succeeds is where it follows the epic and heroic vision of the book. Where it fails is where it attempt to humanize the story for the modern sensibility.

Ron Griggs @60: What kind of work The Lord of the Rings is depends on the context you’re considering it in. Put up against a mainstream literary critic’s preference for novels with psychological characterization, realistic action, and what, in criticizing LOTR for lacking it, they always call “adult themes” (by which they mean sex, since LOTR’s themes of moral corruption, the nature of evil, the necessity of war, and the fear of death are about as adult as you can get), it makes sense to describe it as a romance, an older literary form. And “romance” and related terms like “tale” or “story” are what Tolkien used, because that was the context in which he mostly had to defend his work. He called it a “history” in the context of stating that it was not an allegory, since “history” best explains what the elements often mistaken as allegorical are actually doing there.

However, we’re speaking in another context. Compared with the Silmarillion, LOTR’s close-up action, intense concentration on major characters, long stretches of dialogue and of detailed description, and fairly condensed plot (I mean that the bulk of the book takes place over a period of months rather than centuries), all make it much more like a novel than his earlier mythological work. See Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon by Brian Rosebery for a discussion of this point. Substitute, if you wish to be picky, “novelish” or “novel-like” in my earlier comment.

And this is the context relevant to the matter at hand. Everything you say in your second paragraph is exactly what Tolkien had in mind for his mythology when he originally created it, and it is exactly what he changed his opinion on when he published LOTR and found himself faced with the real world of dramatic adaptations and how he felt about what they did to the story he had created. It was not a story he was giving to the world to fill in gaps and modify as it liked, it was his artistic endeavor which he was giving to read as he wrote it.

(Even in his pre-publication description of what he’d had in mind, which is on p. 144-5 of his Letters, he’s curiously restrained. He wants others to fill in what he left sketchy, not to rewrite his own work. He wants them to be artists and musicians, not other writers of poetry and narrative.)

So that – and the other important point that most such medieval reworkings of their own period’s now-classic stories are bad and justly forgotten – is why neither I, nor Tolkien, could shrug off bad adaptations of LOTR as you suggest.

@67 katenepveu,

At the end of the Aragorn/Arwen story, Aragorn suggests to her as he is dying that she could still change her mind and go West. Her response isn’t, “No, I still love you and want to be with you beyond death even though the dying part is worse than I imagined.” Instead, it’s essentially, “Too late. I don’t think I could find a ship.” That suggests to me that if she thought it was possible, she would at least consider undoing her choice and staying an elf.

And the fact that Arwen wasn’t in the story is what makes me dislike her. Luthien was always part of Beren’s adventure; when she wasn’t actively out hunting with him, she was at least planning with him and advising him. Arwen not only didn’t go the warrior-princess route, she didn’t even attend the Council of Elrond and give everyone the benefit of her wisdom. She was nothing more than a passive prize to be won, and I don’t like that in my female characters.

Kelly – I’m sorry you feel you have to carry a torch for Peter Jackson. It’s him I’m dismissing, not you, and he deserves it, not you.

The point that it’s not the necessities of adaptation, but the type of specific changes Jackson made, that are the problem, remains unresponded to – and, judging from every conversation I’ve ever had or seen others have on this subject, unanswerable.

So I know how to read the huff you’ve driven off in.

Kate, You’ll have to tell me what was any ruder than what was was said to me, unless the person being insulted is Peter Jackson. And again, Peter Jackson insulted me with his movies.

Peter Jackson:

Dwarves are not comic relief.

Thanks for making Faramir a jerk.

It’s been a long time since this was posted but I figured I should throw in my thoughts anyway. :P

I read the books in 4th grade, which is also when FotR came out, so at that point in time I loved every minute of both. Therefore, I may be a little biased in my defense of all of the above. I doubt I have to defend the books (the only part that I really hate is that the Prologue and Chapters 3-6 of Fellowship move like molasses, and the ents and Shire scouring didn’t thrill me), but I have a few things to say about the movies.

First, I know Tolkien fans tend to be very devoted, so it’s unsurprising that everyone is going to pick these movies apart. I am a huge Tolkien fan and I too found some parts of the movies very jarring.

In FotR, I noticed the lack of the Prologue about hobbit culture, the Old Forest, and Tom (but didn’t really miss them, to be honest). Frodo was way cooler in the book, so I appreciated him a lot more than my dad seemed to, who hadn’t read the books. Boromir was douchier, but I never liked him anyway, and the way he acted was a good way to point out that the other option is to bring the Ring to Gondor. I did notice the comic relief in Gimli and Pippin, and it annoys me too, but it didn’t really piss me off until TTT. I noticed Aragorn not getting Anduril, but I think it worked in the movies. And, obviously, I noticed that they actually made Arwen a central character and got rid of Glorfindel. I think I get their reasoning in that romance is a big appeal to moviegoers and there aren’t a lot of girls in LotR, but that annoyed me right off the bat. In 4th grade, I thought the filmmakers had made up the whole story. I didn’t look it up in the Appendix for years. I noticed that the rest of the Boromir death scene was inserted into the end, but I honestly thought that it fit better in FotR. I imagine Tolkien wanted to keep everything from Frodo’s perspective in FotR, of course, but I thought Jackson made a good decision there. I loved most of the special effects (and I actually enjoyed wizard-fu just because I wanted to see more magic when I first read the books), but even then the Galadriel thing just looked stupid.

I originally thought the movies improved as they went. I now consider them RotK>FotR>TTT, whereas I see them as RotK>TTT>FotR in the books. This is because, re-watching them, I notice that all my annoyances from the first one were greatly enhanced here. The Gimli and Pippin stuff was thoroughly irritating and there was a ridiculous amount of Arwen flashbacks. I should point out that I like Liv Tyler, though. It’s just that her subplot was dumb. I liked Faramir in the books because he didn’t foresee the Ring coming within his grasp and didn’t take it anyway, whereas here he was an ass about it. The Warg rider subplot was kind of cool to me at the time just because it was action and the romance stuff was bugging me, but now I see it as annoying too. It only feels necessary because they bogged that part of the movie down in boring, useless junk. I know that they wanted to fill RotK with cool stuff, but why not get rid of the flashbacks, and Warg battle and replace them with, I don’t know, Pippin getting the Palantir? Or Shelob? Or something? Then RotK wouldn’t have to be 3 hours 20 minutes. It felt as though they forgot about Frodo and Sam in the movie, too, whereas they were literally half of the book. I figured they would ruin it with RotK after I saw TTT’s stopping point.

In RotK, though, I felt things started going back to the actual plot. Less Arwen junk and comic relief and more main storyline. I didn’t like the Frodo telling Sam to go home bit, and I doubt many other people here did either, but I guess from a movie standpoint I can see how it’d be hard to film them getting separated in Shelob’s Lair. Again, the Anduril thing bugged me, but I think they had a cool idea in the movie, so I kind of forgive them. Obviously the Shire scouring was absent, but that’s another part that didn’t thrill me all that much in the books (although it was waaaaaaay better than the Shire stuff at the beginning of FotR). In fact… That’s just about it for RotK. I loved it. It felt like all of the people who were out of character before were in character again here. Faramir was suddenly cool, for example. My biggest complaint is that it was twenty minutes longer than the last two and if TTT hadn’t wasted so much time it wouldn’t have had to be.

So yeah, lots of complaints, although I didn’t think the others you mentioned were a big deal. (Well… And the Gandalf/Saruman fake-out thing was kind of dumb).

On the other hand, part of why I’ll defend the movies is that they’re still so much fun to watch to me. I’ve never spent my time or money on the Extended Editions, admittedly, seeing as I’ve read the books anyway and the theatrical releases were how they were intended. But in the case of the original versions, purely from a moviegoer standpoint, they’re awesome. Including TTT. I should also mention that I liked the Helm’s Deep sequence. It was long, yes, but it’s something else that just worked for me.

Frankly, I can overlook all of the complaints I mentioned though, other than that TTT didn’t cover enough plot and essentially left a giant mess to clear up for RotK, which is the shortest book… Whatever. I love it all. :)

“Okay, I confess, I am almost willing to bear the existence of the entire movie just for the shot of Aragorn pushing open the double doors.”

There isn’t a woman who’s seen that who would disagree with you.