Ohhh, man. I’m back from my 12:05 showing at the Showcase theater in Warwick, RI. The geeks turned out in droves. I had a terrific dinner with a friend, and my Gimli action figure was slow-dancing with a salt-shaker on the table. Eventually, Gimli takes a bow and we hop over to the theater at 10:30. It’s already packed… the line for the 12:05 show (there were three midnight shows: 12:05, 12:10, 12:15) was pretty damned long already, and filling fast. We step into line and try to keep our wits as the minutes crawl off my watch at roughly one minute per five minutes. You get the idea. Some high school girls are dressed in renn faire clothes and are swooning over Legolas. I’m quoting my man Gimli like a fiend. “Roaring fires, malt beeer…” and so forth.
Blah blah.
Time passes and we finally get inside the damn theater. People settle in, and it’s a good crowd: very vocal. We boo and cheer the trailers. It feels like a community. Some new Vin Diesel flick? Boooo! The trailers end and the lights lower. People start cheering. Whooping, clapping, yelling. Then, the New Line logo floats in and “shhhhh!” is everywhere. The action starts and the crowd is dead entranced.
The toughest thing for me was slipping into the first half hour. I thought it would be terrific just jumping back into the story without much of a recap, but you know what? It felt kinda like being taken with no foreplay. If you’ll pardon me. The movie opens, as you’ve no doubt read, in Khazad-Dum with Gandalf and the Balrog. The geek in me notices that here Frodo screams “Noooo” before Gandalf falls, which isn’t how it is in Fellowship. I then smacked myself for being the kind of person who’d notice such a thing. Gollum creeps straight up on Frodo and Sam, there’s very little rebuilding of suspense on the whole Hey-there’s-Gollum-he’s-following-us thing. They capture him and we get to see the great Gollum acting we’ve heard so much about. It’s… so-so… until later. In all the first half hour felt like a rocket-ride back into Middle-Earth, when you could perhaps appreciate a slower immersion. Just my take.
After that, though, things pick up. Where things really changed for me was a scene featuring Gollum having a very cleverly done argument with himself. Gollum in the movie has two personalities- one that’s pitiable and almost endearing, the other the horrid opportunistic sleaze we know and love. I’m no Tolkien scholar, but I’m pretty sure that’s not how it is in the books. It works, though, and it pays off wonderfully after Gollum is “betrayed” by Frodo. He’d banished the evil side of himself, and been generally happy… but as he feels the master has tricked him, he has a powerful moment (paraphrased):
GOLLUM (back turned, arguing with his just-returned evil side)
Master stoles it, he stoles it… No, why would he steal it? He means Smeagol no harm. FOOL! He tricks us, and stoles it!!!
FARAMIR
He stole… what?
GOLLUM (turns to the camera, all menace and loathing)
My Preciousssssss!
Goosebumps. Great scene. So, do I buy the whole thing about Andy Serkis and the Oscar possibility? I don’t know. Gollum DOES steal the show, and he IS incredible to watch, but I think his appeal is in the script and facial animation. The voice takes a back seat to those eyes and that awful mouth. Gollum will make you laugh, too. There’s a funny little part where he’s just caught a fish, and he’s happily singing a little ditty to himself. Kinda like a child singing the “My bologna has a first name” jingle. It almost made him huggable.
What stood out?
The marsh (which is it? I forget the name). The dead faces in the water are incredibly creepy, and once Frodo’s fallen in, the creepy crawls all over you like eels.
Legolas swinging up into the saddle, as seen in the recent TV clip, got a round of hearty applause. Everyone loved it.
Gimli was the comic relief, again, but this time I had a better time with it. He was much funnier, and he had some nice dramatic moments. There was actually closure with the “Nobody tosses a dwarf” line so many people were iffy about last year, myself included, and it’s winning. “Just… don’t tell the elf…” I yelled when Gimli leapt down from the wall into the sea of orcs, armed with his axe and deadly intentions.
Fellowship members by the wayside. Gandalf is in the film for maybe twenty minutes, and he’s far from the Gandalf the Grey we loved in Fellowship. That’s appropriate, as he’s white now, and different, but the power and majesty of the character was just left cooling on the windowsill while other things simmered. Kinda sad that way. Pippen and Merry- blech. I know we can’t really have the same two hobbits, now that they’ve been abducted and subjected to horrors, but… they just don’t seem the same at all now, or even vaguely interesting. Merry’s angry speech up through his eyebrows at Treebeard just looked silly to me.
Helm’s Deep. I wasn’t looking forward to this so much. I never got the tension before. Well, the movie wired up the suspense and made damned sure I knew what was at stake. Then, when you can dimly see the orcs coming through the mist, you just about soil yourself, safe in your little theater seat.
Creatures. The wargs, ents, oliphants, and fell beasts are terrific fun to watch. The oliphants are only on screen very briefly. I was hoping for more of these things. Their scale is shown, though, and it’s awesome to behold. Wargs are… certainly good enough, but I’d rather more wolf and a bit less hyena. That’s just me. The ents were great, but I don’t think their fury came across well. The book made me think of ent anger as being terrible and fearsome, but an angry ent in the movie just walks quicker and smashes orcs around in an almost annoyed fashion. Not enraged enough. Fell beasts win the HOLY CRAP award, because when these things are in the sky, they’re as frightening as they should be. One flies up to Frodo in a slow motion scene, and we see it very clearly. It’s breathtaking.
The cleansing of Isengard. Great fun. When the dam gives way and the water comes down on the courtyard like the wrath of Sam Jackson, it gets more than a few gasps and claps from the audience.
Frodo and Sam. This, along with Gimli, is what I feel is most improved over what we saw in the first movie. The chemistry here is more potent, and we see Sam shrink back as Frodo becomes more and more dark. In the end, we’ll have seen Frodo at Sam’s throat, but they’re still walking along talking like old friends, and I feel the connection better than I did before.
The cutting between scenes… I didn’t care for it. I think this is one of those translation issues, but- meh.
One thing I’d like to mention is this movie’s too-often used. Last movie, it was the slow shot of the ring in someone’s hand. In this one, it’s silent teardrops. Almost every character in the movie has a moment where we see a tear fall from their eye.
So, to sum up, Gollum is the shizzy. Gimli is STILL the shizzy, just even more so, even if he’s still the funny little dwarf-man shizzy.
THE TWO TOWERS is a different plate of the same meal, and once you accept what you’re eating, you’ll have a hell of a time.
Aaaaand bedtime.
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