That's twice now that I've much preferred the "Extended Edition" of a Lord of the Rings epic to its theatrical alternative. The first film was subtitled The Fellowship of the Ring and I felt it was stifled by the Frodo-centric route they took for mass consumption; likewise, the Extended Edition of The Two Towers, on which I am burnt out but which I completely adore, is improved by restorations that favour scope over intimacy. I imagine I've championed the opposite in the past when it comes to director's cuts, but while the One Ring is a multi-faceted albatross that Elijah Wood as Frodo seems to interpret as a case of influenza, its contiguous motifs--temptation, corruption, anarchy, monarchy, alliance, leadership (to cite a handful)--are like math: universal.
Conversely breezier despite a 43-minute longer running time, The Two Towers EE reinstates a beloved passage from the book wherein Pippin (Billy Boyd) imbibes Ent Draft, an elixir that causes growth spurts in hobbits (but more importantly facilitates a moment between the series' veritable Laurel and Hardy sans Treebeard or Uruk-hai), adds a third dimension to Gandalf the White's personality (though the characterization remains a tad anaemic next to Gandalf the Grey's in either rendition of the first film), and puts three sequences back in their proper place that allow The Two Towers to finally feel as elegiac as its predecessor Fellowship. (In this regard, the extra footage better integrates Gollum into the ensemble by relieving him of the picture's emotional brunt--it psychologically improves the special effects, if you will.) I'm referring to a spectacular recitation of a poem by Treebeard that, married to a resonant aerial sweep of Middle-Earth, haunts like a David Tibet dirge; a funeral ceremony for Thhere.)
2.35:1 DVD capture: The Two Towers: Extended Edition
The Two Towers: Special Extended DVD Edition spreads the film across two platters, the four discs total packaged in a cardboard slipcase/gatefold combo with or without a Gollum maquette that hikes up the price. Asterisks in the chapter menus denote scenes that are new or contain additions, and a quartet of energetic, if redundant full-length commentaries supplement the feature presentation. (See sidebar for participants.) The 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer is the slightest bit softer than that of the previous release but a marginal improvement upon the Fellowship of the Ring EE; as anticipated by yours truly in our last Two Towers review, the 6.1 DTS-ES mix of the EE wipes the floor with the Dolby Digital track--it's more thunderous and more intricate, a heightened you-are-there experience to almost surpass the unsurpassable audio of the Fellowship EE. Proceed to the third and fourth platters for the remaining goodies, summarized below in viewing order.
Part Three: The Journey Continues...
INTRODUCTION (2 mins.)
Peter Jackson welcomes us to the DVD "appendices" and whets our appetite for the supplements to come by saying that of the three The Lord of the Rings movies, The Two Towers was the hardest to script, shoot, and edit.
J.R.R. TOLKIEN - ORIGINS OF MIDDLE-EARTH (29 mins.)
First among equals in this congregation of Tolkien scholars is biographer Tom Shippey (J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century), who, like the other interviewees, spouts facts and insights on Tolkien's friendship with fellow fantasy writer C.S. Lewis (one possible inspiration for Treebeard), in addition to The Two Towers' roots in/parallels to WWII and the depersonalization (i.e. industrialization) of combat. The issue of whether this qualifies it as allegory in spite of Tolkien's frequently parroted objection to the word is not broached and probably couldn't be with any grace.
FROM BOOK TO SCRIPT: FINDING THE STORY (21 mins.)
Here, co-screenwriter Philippa Boyens introduces what will become a refrain of these appendices: such-and-such "would have Tolkien rolling in his grave." Lovely and worldly, Boyens seems conflicted but no less confident about implementing controversial changes to the novel that were, in some cases, necessitated by cinematic syntax. (Fidelity to the uneventful Faramir subplot, for instance, would be "death on film.") The decisions to put a Gandalf speech in the mouth of the ethically opposite Wormtongue and move Shelob to Return of the King are eloquently defended.
DESIGNING AND BUILDING MIDDLE-EARTH
DESIGNING MIDDLE EARTH (46 mins.)
Close-quartered middle-aged geeks John Howe and Alan Lee (the Tolkien illustrators hired on by the production as conceptual artists) are starting to get on each other's nerves, and it makes for a humorous aside in this doc, which extensively honours the role that both men played in the look of The Two Towers. The breathtaking Rohan set that was erected atop an existing valley crest called Mt. Sunday is also given its due, and we learn that each step leading up to the Helm's Deep castle was chiselled into a rock slope by hand. It's impossible to take the film's craftsmanship for granted after this featurette.
WETA WORKSHOP (43 mins.)
The irony not lost on us, imperious Howe admires the lack of a dominant personality in Weta workshop supervisor Richard Taylor's crew: "It's the work that's important, not the person who's doing it." Lee impishly retells a story he promised to keep in confidence regarding Howe's airport misadventures, eccentric Brad Dourif (Wormtongue) remembers his girlfriend screaming "fuck" at the top of her lungs upon learning that her lover would be shaving his eyebrows for the film, and Howe is called on his double-standard of fastidiously rechecking every belt buckle on every costume while drafting creatures that defy the laws of physics. These Lord of the Rings discs rekindle one's interest in the dead-horse topic of movie magic by focusing on the personalities behind the illusions.
DESIGN GALLERIES
Galleries overflowing with sketches and paintings for "The Peoples of Middle-Earth" and "The Realms of Middle-Earth." As with the remaining gallery sections, you can view the selections individually or as a slideshow, or, in some cases, with a snippet of commentary from the respective artist.
GOLLUM
THE TAMING OF SMÉAGOL (40 mins.)
The extent to which Andy Serkis is responsible for the performance of the CGI Gollum was often challenged at the time of The Two Towers' release, leading to brouhaha within the Online Film Critics Society, for one. This arresting doc should quiet naysayers once and for good: so influential was Serkis (initially hired for his voice alone) that the design team scrapped years' worth of character work to re-sculpt Gollum's face according to the skeletal structure of Serkis' own. On set in a lycra outfit (a.k.a. "the gimp suit") to assist co-stars Elijah Wood and Sean Astin in blocking out their scenes, the animators also eventually resorted to superimposing Gollum onto these rehearsals with Serkis rather than using the "mime passes"--the official takes--in which he did not appear. Ol' Andy will even play the human Sméagol in The Return of the King--is it Serkis the White, by any chance? That man's got his mojo working.
ANDY SERKIS ANIMATION REFERENCE (2 mins.)
The "schizo" monologue, as it's been so sensitively nicknamed, in a split-screen with how it looked in camera. Serkis' every eye roll and nose crinkle was copied to the letter, as you'll see.
GOLLUM'S STAND-IN (3 mins.)
Executive producer Rick Porras dons the gimp suit for a day of Gollum pick-ups--and hopes in vain that they didn't keep the dailies. Funny stuff.
DESIGN GALLERY
Gollum through the planning stages. Had they stuck with the design to which they were committed pre-Serkis, I think audiences would've lost their collective lunch.
MIDDLE-EARTH ATLAS
A continuation of the interactive map found on the Fellowship EE, this one retraces the paths forged in The Two Towers by Frodo & Sam, Merry & Pippin, Aragorn, Legolas & Gimli, and Gandalf.
NEW ZEALAND AS MIDDLE-EARTH
Featurettes on the New Zealand locales that doubled for Emyn Muil, The Dead Marshes, Rohan, Edoras, Ithilien, Fangorn Forest, and Helm's Deep.
Part Four: The Battle for Middle-Earth Begins
INTRODUCTION (1 min.)
Wood summarizes the content of this fourth platter.
FILMING THE TWO TOWERS
WARRIORS OF THE THIRD AGE (21 mins.)
That there was no caste system to differentiate the "stuntees" from the actors warms; that boisterous stuntee Lani Jackson needed to ask her mother who Errol Flynn was after meeting legendary swordsman Bob Anderson (who hates that he's best known as Darth Vader's double in Star Wars) infuriates; that Viggo Mortenson began greeting cast and crew with a headbutt alarms but amuses.
CAMERAS IN MIDDLE-EARTH (68 mins.)
As necessitated by the fragmented nature of its narrative, the Two Towers shoot splintered off into several units equipped with video feeds that enabled Peter Jackson to oversee the mammoth undertaking via satellite. At last we return to that feeling of camaraderie that endeared us to the Fellowship cast on the previous EE, with Dominic Monaghan joshing Mortenson for striking up a friendship with an extra who turned out to be a woman in a fake beard, Astin taken to task for storming off the set in a huff because Serkis accidentally ripped his wig off, and Orlando Bloom once again characterized as a pretty boy, this time for sustaining a cracked rib that he downplays but that his co-stars imply he complains about to this day when the cameras aren't rolling. There's as much character development going on in these appendices as there is in the films they're covering, and I'm beginning to realize I'll miss this annual DVD treat post-The Return of the King. Best part? A blink-and-you'll-miss-it glimpse of Fran Walsh. I wonder if Peter Jackson's notoriously private significant other knows they slipped it in.
PRODUCTION PHOTOS
Seven screens of photos in total, fewer than you'd actually assume.
VISUAL EFFECTS
MINIATURES:
BIG-ATURES (22 mins.)
40,000 toy soldiers were used to plot the strategy of the Helm's Deep battle, test footage of which dates back to 1998 and is stamped "Miramax." We dutifully explore the 27 ft. Barad-dûr model (something that has a strangely CGI quality on film) and discover that the flooding of Isengard had yet to be created as late as last September, four months prior to the film's premiere.
THE FLOODING OF ISENGARD ANIMATIC (2 mins.)
Not your traditional CGI animatic, but a scissors-and-glue deal that uses plastic wrap to simulate water.
MINIATURE GALLERIES
Seven in total.
WETA DIGITAL (28 mins.)
Regardless of what you think of the sum of its parts, the parts of The Two Towers represent a towering achievement, no pun intended. Approached for Jackson's remake of King Kong that never materialized (a reconceived version goes before the cameras next year), Steve Regelous was brought aboard The Two Towers to program artificially intelligent armies using his groundbreaking (and scary) Massive software; the results were almost too sophisticated for their own good (when sensing an ill-matched opponent, Regelous' soldiers would flee in panic!), and so lucrative that for Helm's Deep, digital Uruk-hais were seamlessly incorporated into both foreground and background action. Rendering Treebeard took 48 hours per frame, it's said--how do these movies ever get finished?
ABANDONED CONCEPTS
Plans for the "Slime Balrog" and "Endless Stair" were aborted but fortunately preserved.
EDITORIAL: REFINING THE STORY (22 mins.)
Jackson justifies his decision to use a separate editor for all three films. The Two Towers' was Mike Horton, who conveys a shell-shocked attitude over the rigours of assembling a fundamentally aimless movie. The Faramir/Boromir flashback exclusive to the EE was a pick-up that, as good as it is, can't help but seem a bit of waste in light of its ultimately superfluous relationship to the theatrical edition. (The schizo speech was another, more advantageous reshoot.) Most revealing is producer Barrie Osborne's comment that digital grading buys an extra couple of weeks in post, as it cancels out the neg-cutting stage--I knew there had to be an ulterior motive to the grading process, whose abuse can affect image clarity.
MUSIC AND SOUND
MUSIC FOR MIDDLE-EARTH (25 mins.)
A fun recap of what transpired in the Abbey Road music suite. (Naturally, composer Howard Shore, Jackson, and others get their picture taken doing the Beatles pose.) Jackson convinced Shore to let him bang a gong over a pivotal Éowyn sighting, and it's those sort of sanity-maintaining distractions that led to the studio clamping down on the auteur, forcing him to promise 5.5 minutes of locked picture a day.
THE SOUNDSCAPES OF MIDDLE-EARTH (21 mins.)
A fairly typical but enthralling deconstruction of sound design in which Jackson falls flat on his face trying to get a stadium full of rowdy cricket fans to cheer an unseen Saruman.
SOUND DEMO: HELM'S DEEP
There were approximately 80 sound elements combined to pull off the Helm's Deep sequence, and here they're organized into seven distinct tracks for our examination/appreciation. (The intricate final mix is housed on an eighth channel.) It's intriguing, but one wishes for greater interactivity.
"THE BATTLE FOR HELM'S DEEP IS OVER..." (9 mins.)
"Post-production on The Two Towers was the darkest path of the entire seven year experience," Jackson says. Though we're exhausted by the end of this riveting four-disc distillation of the ordeal, a lot of that fatigue is empathy for the cast and crew. Jackson admits in closing that he wants the Lord of the Rings trilogy to inspire the next crop of filmmakers--these Extended DVDs no doubt increase the odds of that happening.-Bill Chambers
2.35:1 DVD capture: The Two Towers: Extended Edition
© Film Freak Central; filmfreakcentral.net. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author.
|
|
Buy at Amazon USA
Buy at Amazon Canada
or Compare Prices
|
DVD GRADES:
Image A
Sound A+
Extras A+
|
DVD VITALS:
RunningTime
222 minutes
MPAA
PG-13
AspectRatio(s)
2.35:1 ONLY, 16x9-enhanced
Languages
English DD 5.1 EX,
English 6.1 DTS-ES
English Dolby Surround
CC
Yes
Subtitles
English, Spanish
4 DVD-9s
Region One
New Line
|
The Director & Writers - Peter Jackson (director, co-writer); Fran Walsh (co-writer); Philippa Boyens (co-writer)
dvd reviews: