![]() ![]() It won Academy Awards for visual effects and sound editing and three BAFTAs, including the audience award. Cate Blanchett, Liv Tyler, Hugo Weaving, Miranda Otto, Bernard Hill, David Wenham, Karl Urban, and Brad Dourif costar. ![]() The returning cast includes Ian McKellen as Gandalf, Sean Astin as Frodo’s loyal friend Samwise, Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd as hobbits Merry and Pippin, Orlando Bloom as elf warrior Legolas, John Rhys-Davies as dwarf warrior Gimli, and Christopher Lee as Saruman. More than simply translate the fantasy masterpiece to the screen with respect, Jackson brings blood and thunder and human scale to a tale so long relegated to the archetypes of myth. Jackson’s camera once again swoops over landscapes like an eagle, charges through the hordes that blanket the earth, and slows only in moments of intimacy. Jackson dares to throw the viewer into the fray without little more than a brief, nightmarish flashback, and turns the Battle of Helm’s Deep, a brief ten page episode in the novel, into the thrilling turning point in the war: the first glimpse of the coming apocalypse and the triumph of solidarity in the face of the march of evil. The motion-capture performance by Andy Serkis set the bar for the marriage of acting and special effects. The famously computer generated Gollum is a wonder of a character, a feral stray dog with a schizophrenic nature at war with himself when he gets his first taste of kindness from Frodo, as tragically human as any character in the party. And he turns the wary relationship between Frodo and the gnarled, psychotically obsessed Gollum into the defining drama of Frodo’s hopes and fears along the quest. ![]() Jackson finds the soul of the film in Viggo Mortensen’s wandering warrior-prince Aragorn, reveals the torment in Elijah Wood’s chosen-one pilgrim Frodo and the soul-crushing weight of the ring that Tolkien could only talk around. Peter Jackson’s cinematic recreation of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) is thrilling, enthralling, and dizzyingly exciting. But, for a few key points, it’s not actually very exciting. Tolkien’s original fantasy trilogy is many things: dense, literate, imaginative, epic, mythic. ![]()
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