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Rating: “Cinema closed until real life doesn't feel like a movie. Stay safe. Be kind” reads the sign that circulated on social media in recent weeks. It's true. Aside from being physically closed, cinema as a window of the mind, wide open to what's possible, has violently withdrawn. One can no longer escape from a normally gray reality because it is no longer gray. It is black with pessimism, red with blood, but certainly not gray. It is alive, fighting against death, compelling. And the chronicle is matching, if not surpassing, science fiction.
I won't speak much about all this; I've already done so in an editorial. I'm writing to you because after the first month without a break, I did watch some films in the following month. On TV, on DVD, on platforms. But not so much things I missed, rather titles I had already seen, as consolation, as an enchanted repetition of what was already known and loved, for the sake of feeling comforted by what one knows. Because out there everything is unknown, the future is shrouded in mists.
Hyperbolic Expectations
It happens then that on a lazy evening, between one video call and another, I decide to start The Two Towers. For a fourteen-year-old me, it was a half disappointment. Because I had, in my mind, scenes from the first film etched like indelible frescoes. When memory works by comparisons, it's hard to be satisfied. And so I even criticized the sequence of Gandalf plummeting with the Balrog. Too much action, an excessive concession compared to the hieratic images of The Fellowship of the Ring.
I didn't like this film much. Certainly because the other had captivated me, made me love cinema with a new love that I did not know. A love for the abundance of details, the extreme care, and the attention in rendering the complexity of the narrated material (this does not mean absolute fidelity to the novel, mind you). It was more than watching a film; it was entering well-defined places, a perfectly organic world. A crucial turning point for me.
The second chapter, seen 17 years later (at the time I watched them dozens of times, especially the first) is another gigantic work, no less cyclopean than the other two. Or perhaps it is, slightly, but we are nonetheless in the category of giants.
A Clear Vision
Though losing a bit of the compositional clarity and order of the first, it manages to deliver equally suggestive images. I think of Edoras, standing out with its dark stone amidst the threatened lands of Rohan. Not to mention Minas Tirith, beautiful and steep like men's ambition. Or Helm's Deep, tough but frightened. Granite innards trembling. The technique is precise, the use of shots insistently widens the vision, to give the feeling of an organic world, to provide the schemes of the clash immediately. Like Tolkien's maps in the book, having a clear vision is essential. The long shots here are even more important than the close-ups.
Also because these are eminently moral works, I realize this much more than before. A exquisitely Christian reading of the world, with continuous symbolisms and conceptual references to the words of the Gospels. Temptation, the allure of evil, the abysses of men. Their strength. Places correspond to concepts, the different shadings in the scale between good and evil. Hence, it was essential for those places to be clearly present in the viewer's eyes. The black gate, Mount Doom, the two towers. And again the Shire, Rivendell, the mines of Moria. Places that matter even more than the characters. They are temporary actors in the struggle, while the places reverberate the values that were there before and will remain afterward. Evil does not begin here and does not end here.
Structure and Fillers
Surely the aesthetic beauty and significance here feel somewhat the weight of the structure, less effective compared to the debut. There's less to say, fewer and less decisive narrative edges. Some might define it as a long prelude to the final battle at Helm's Deep. Some aspects support this thesis, like the introduction of wargs and Aragorn's misadventure. The lengthiness of Merry and Pippin with the Ents doesn't help the flow, Frodo and Sam's wandering with Gollum doesn't seem to get into the swing of things. It cannot be denied that after the perfect adventure of the first volume, now things proceed lazily, setting the premises for the final blow. This is the flaw of the diptych between volume two and three. Which, by the way, Tolkien had carefully avoided, distributing the material in a diversified way. Shelob is the great absentee.
Language and Ambitions
Beyond some structural flaws, which may only annoy the compulsive viewer, this film too enjoys the highly ambitious choices made by Jackson. The bet is total, an all-in. Like a palingenesis of a new epic cinema, refounded in the 2000s and soon ruined, in favor of the easier superhero epic. The intention was to make a true, difficult epic, without simplifications. A very deep breath that requires patience but then gives a lot, much more than the simple joy of winning a battle. It's not about battles here; it's about symbols, thresholds to be crossed or not. Nuances.
The error of the epigones of The Lord of the Rings is not understanding this, and perhaps, in its certain phases, even Jackson indulges in it. If you ask the viewer for minimal effort, minimal will be the gratification they will get from the viewing. Here the characters speak in hyperbatons (“There is no promise you make that I trust,” “Not by chance do Lórien's leaves fall”). If you simplify a high material by definition, you debase it. This is why Hollywood has restarted with comics, to drink from a medium style accessible to all, which does not fear being "tarnished." Here, for example, the exchanges between Gimli and Legolas are cloying, sounding like verbal fillers to the long battle scenes. In other words, Jackson respects and knows how much concepts matter, but at the same time, he is caught up in the performative and spectacular grandiosity of Hollywood. He gives cinema an elixir and, together, its poison. But the less discerning productions will drink only the latter in the following years.
Special Effects and Faces
The casting of this trilogy is excellent, especially in the key characters. Frodo, Gandalf, Aragorn. Forever fixed in cinema history. But here, if you will, are also the less convincing faces. From Faramir to Éowyn, to Théoden. Lacking a bit of charisma. Better for others, like Grima and Éomer. The best character by far is Gollum. As writing, as CGI rendering, marking an epochal turning point (famous is the use of motion capture on Andy Serkis's body). And here we connect to one of the decisive aspects. The mixed use of computer graphics, real scenarios, miniature models. The shadows, the shots, the editing, all contribute to cloaking what we see, whether real or fictional, with an incredible weight of reality. There is nothing light here, not even the beasts tearing the skies bringing the Nazgul. Even Gandalf's pure light can be felt, it is present.
Browsing the web one can understand the difficulties of rendering all this, the problems with locations, the long post-production. I won’t repeat it, read for yourselves if you don't know. What I emphasize is the unrepeatable capacity (which wasn’t achieved even remotely in the films on The Hobbit) to take this pachyderm of cinema, of stuff in front of a camera, and give it life, to mold it, adding but also importantly removing the non-essential, pruning the many trappings that could tempt.
The Right Measure
In being hypertrophic and vast, this film is almost minimalist. This is why it remains a work that marks the history of cinema. It looked to long times, instead of getting lost in aesthetic flights. Everything we see is essential to the great story (or almost, see above). The narrative urgency is a moral urgency, an unavoidable cognitive path. Fantasy has never been so ponderous, arduous, necessary.
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