The film captures the fear in Tolkien’s own heart of a sense of grandeur, magic, nobility and compassion slipping away from the world, of crumbling societies forgetting and discarding the principles that once made them great in favor of cold, emotionless modernism. This is the film in the series with an ethos most succinctly summed up with a single word that characters are always repeating (it’s “hope”), but there’s also a lot more to it than that. We should never stop being thankful, then, that The Lord of the Rings arrived when it did, and that Jackson was given free rein to project the somber, dignified, noble but despairing energy that makes The Two Towers stand out so starkly. The director’s own Hobbit trilogy from a few years later gives an unnerving glimpse of how easily this project could have been sabotaged by studio meddling. And lord only knows what Jackson’s LOTR might have looked like if it had been stuck in development hell for a few more years, arriving after Spider-Man had more thoroughly established the mold of the modern superhero film, and in turn the modern blockbuster franchise. The visuals seen at Helm’s Deep, meanwhile, couldn’t have been rendered only a few years earlier, with groundbreaking effects work (especially in large crowds of CGI orcs) from Weta Workshop that set a new standard for large-scale action scenes. Peter Jackson’s film trilogy was a deeply unlikely movie miracle, one that came about with exactly the right people, at exactly the right time, as the keys to the most famous fantasy fiction IP in history were improbably handed off to a relatively untested New Zealand director best known for splatter horror movies. Granted, we were exceedingly lucky to ever have a chance to see such a spectacle brought to life in the first place, a topic we’ve written about before at considerable length. With that giant set piece as its anchor, The Two Towers both honors its source material and provides a thrilling siege that few other films have managed to even approach in the last two decades. But what it can boast is the best damn fantasy battle in cinema history, and one of the most satisfying incarnations of Tolkien’s story, in the form of Helm’s Deep. That second entry, released 20 years ago this weekend, can’t lay claim to the heart and warmth of Fellowship, or the scale and stakes of Return of the King. Too often, these follow-ups feel more akin to connective material, bridging the gap between a memorable introduction and epic conclusion.Īnd yet, if you polled film fans about the best pure entry in Peter Jackson’s iconic Lord of the Rings trilogy, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if middle movie The Two Towers managed to edge out The Fellowship of the Ring for the crown, with The Return of the King finishing a distant (and deserved) third. The Empire Strikes Back is much more exception than rule in this respect, and middle installments have a tendency to suffer in retrospective analysis, lacking the wondrous introduction to a cinematic world offered by the first entry, or the catharsis of closure found in a trilogy ender. Rarely is the middle installment in a film trilogy the entry that any fandom would coalesce around and advance as that trilogy’s finest moment.
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