Day 58: The Two Towers (2002)

Movie #31 – The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) - 179 min, cert 12.

Following on immediately from The Fellowship of the Ring, the fellowship itself has been broken. Boromir has been killed, Merry & Pippin have been captured, Aragorn, Legolas & Gimli are chasing after them, Frodo & Sam are making their own way to Mordor, and Gandalf was last seen plunging into the bowels of the earth. The film concentrates mainly on Frodo & Sam’s journey towards Mordor, guided by Gollum, and on the defence of the fort at Helm’s Deep against evil hordes of Orcs and Uruk-Hai.

This movie has quite a different look to the first one. It takes a lot of its running time up on the battle for Helm’s Deep, the first full-on conflict of the series between opposing armies. In this way it sets the scene for the raging battles still to come in the final part of the trilogy. The visual effects are, of course, as marvellous as ever, but I don’t really have anything new to say about it than I’ve already said about the other two films.

I originally saw this one, like the first one, at the cinema, which is where a film of this scale really deserves to be seen. It was always a great regret of mine that I never got a chance to see the third film at the cinema, but instead had to wait until the DVD came out to see it on the small screen, and inevitably films like these lose something when viewed like this.

Score – 8/10. My LOTR experience may be a little jaded now, but I can still remember being amazed at what was possible when I first saw it at the cinema, and my score reflects that.

Next up is Sunset Boulevard, which breaks the run of 13 films which I’d seen before. I literally know nothing about it, so I’ll be going in completely fresh.