Re: OT: Two Towers movie

At 11:31 AM 8/29/03 -0700, you wrote:
> > Ian,
> >
> > Thanks for the laugh.  My husband and I are still trying to get over our
> > disappointment over the many very poor choices made in the movie of the Two
> > Towers.
>
>
>Curious--what choices would those be? Overall, I'm still a great fan of
>the films, though Two Towers diverged from it source much more than
>Fellowship.
>
>Personally, I wanted to see more ents, and I couldn't figure out why they
>changed Faramir's character so much. Other than that, the changes were
>defensible and mostly inconsequential.
(Warning: rant coming)

Well, Aragorn falling over a cliff is not one of the best ideas in the
movie.  And the wargs don't look a bit like any picture of a wolf that I've
ever seen.  (My daughter says they look like a cross between a pig and a
sheep and a bull.)  I'll excuse them for making up the fight with the
wolfriders in the first place.

Helm's Deep is severely understaffed.  There were 1000 armed men of
Westfold already behind the Deeping Wall when King Theoden arrived at the
head of a column of 1000 more fully armed RIders.  In the movie, they had
only 300 men and boys, many or most of them not even trained warriors, thus
necessitating the addition of the Elvish archers from Lorien to get them
out of trouble.  (The Last Alliance of Elves and Men really was the last
alliance, and the two races have mostly gone their separate ways in the
millenia since.)  There is something lacking in their portrayal of
Theoden.  In the book, he was (without any urging) very eager to go out and
die gloriously in battle.  Not so in the movie.  It is Aragorn (in the
movie) who suggests that they make that mounted charge out of the gate of
the Hornburg at dawn.  In the book, it was Theoden's idea.  (Just for
giggles, next time you see the movie, count how many mounted men are in
that charge down the causeway.  It's around 6-8, I think.  You know, they
had up to 250 horses and riders on hand for the battle of the
Pelennor.  You'd think they could have sent a few more charging down the
causeway at Helm's Deep.  It would have looked much better.  But that's a
nit.)  What they did to the character of the Rohirrim is not a nit.  They
emasculated them.  They turned them into a bunch of scared farmers.  This
has the potential to get them into trouble in the third movie.  The
Rohirrim riding to the rescue of Gondor has to be believable.  Those men
and boys preparing for battle at Helm's Deep, they're going to rescue Minas
Tirath?  They needed the Elves to rescue *them.*  The Rohirrim have to be
completely believable as a brave and heroic people.  A lot of the stuff
they did in Two Towers works against this image.  (Another nit is that the
Rohirim look *so* scruffy.  If you read the book carefully, both the men
and the horses wore their hair braided.  This indicates to me that there
was some pride taken in personal appearance and not the total disregard for
cleanliness and grooming that you see in the movie.)  BTW, I completely
forgive them for having Eomer, not Erkenbrand lead in the Riders at
dawn.  That is completely understandable; no need to complicate the story
and confuse the audience.  (I do not, however, forgive them for staging a
large cavalry charge down an *incredibly* steep incline.  It just isn't
believable.  In this case, you know those had to be MASSIVE horses because
real ones couln't do that.)

I also really disliked the way that they had Gandalf "exorcize" Saruman
from Theoden.  If they'd just followed the book, things would have been
quite dramatic enough.  I mean, Gandalf raises his staff, the sky darkens
and there is a crack of thunder, and Wormtongue sprawls on his face, struck
dumb.  (If I remember correctly.)  That's dramatic.  Testing Grima's
loyalty by giving him a horse and seeing where he would ride to is also
dramatic, or is that too subtle for modern audiences?  Can't the audience
agree to stick around for a little dialog?  There had to have been a better
way of handling the healing of Theoden than the way they did it.  (In fact
my husband sums up his disappointment with this movie by saying, "There had
to have been a better way.")  Theoden's dramatic "reverse aging" is a
little too dramatic (and fake) for my taste.

There had to have been a better way of handling the Entmoot.  The movie
totally reversed the decision of the ents and Pipin had to trick Treebeard
into changing his mind.

What they did to Faramir is just inexcusable -- and so far,
inexplicable.  We're looking forward to buying the extended edition in
November so we can listen to the commentary and perhaps hear an explanation
of what on earth Peter Jackson was thinking when he did this.  (As my
husband put it, now Eowyn is too good for Faramir.  Not that the love story
between the two of them will make it into the movie anyway.)

And what is this whole thing with Arwen apparently leaving for Valinor and
Aragorn letting her?  Don't those two know what it means to be
betrothed?  And, for that matter, what is this business (which started in
the first movie) of Aragorn not really wanting to be King of Gondor?  In
the books, he's spent the last 60 years working carefully towards making
that possible.

Eowyn, OTOH, was awesome, and so was Gollum.  As ever, the music was
great.  The battle of Helm's Deep was an awesome spectacle.  And I also
happen to particularly like that scene where Elrond tells his daughter
that, if she marries Aragorn, she will have to taste mortality, and you
have a flash-forward to King Elessar's death and Arwen's reaction to it.  I
thought that was a nice touch, and it's taken from Appendix A.

I'm still very much looking forward to Return of the King, and I'm not too
afraid that they've gone and messed it up.  I'm definitely looking forward
to seeing Eowyn and Merry kill a nazgul.  Some of my favorite pieces in the
books are from "The Battle of the Pelennor Fields."  My other favorite
chapter in the books is "The Voice of Saruman."  (I didn't realize how
really good the writing is in that chapter until I read it aloud to my
children.)  I'm waiting to see what they do with it in the movie, because
Christopher Lee is absolutely the perfect actor for that sort of thing.

In any case, I need to stop discussing the movie now so that I can go and
watch the extras from the movie with my children.

This morning, my son, after seeing the movie last night, got up and made
one of Gimli's larger battle axes for himself out of K'NEX.  He's just now
made a smaller one.  (K'NEX is a snap-together construction toy, which we
own a lot of.)

Isidora

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