TWO TOWERS IS GOOD, BUT

Two Towers is good, but not great. Spoilers ahead, as usual. Despite valiant counterefforts and really gigantic oliphants, its still comes off as filler, and sometimes it’s even a little too Tolkeinesque, by which I mean plodding and stiff. For instance, Gandalf no longer shows any of the warmth and humanity I appreciated in the last film. Granted, he’s barely a character in this one, suddenly showing up, revealing he’s now a Klansman, then taking off again to find re-enforcements. Still, they could have inserted some light-hearted interaction with Gimli or Legolas or something. Gollum, on the other hand, was awsome. Best CG character I’ve seen to date, though still not perfect. Almost all close-up shots were damn near photorealistic, and not just the textures, lighting, and color, but the facial contortions and expressions too. Combined with the guy who did the voice acting, the whole Gollum package was brilliant: pitiful, disgusting, brutal, bestial, schizo. They managed to make him more than just a cartoon, which is quite a feat. But most (not all) whole-body shots of him moving around broke the fantasy. You can just tell what parts are key-framed. If I were some kind of genius graphics programmer I would write a porgram called Jerky that would make key-framed stuff look less smooth. Or develop much better motion-capture interfaces.

The ents kind of got the shrift, but most of the stuff that made them interesting the books was expository, so I can see why their screen time was short. However, I have no idea why they screwed with Faramir. As you may recall, Faramir is Boromir’s brother, heir to the stweardship of Gondor, and supposedly close to the Numenorean standards of honor and semi-psychic power than his brother. Now, they managed to find someone who could easily be Sean Bean’s brother, but they made hm evil! He tried to take Frodo and the Ring back to Denethor, which is all wrong. The only thing that makes Faramir interesting in the book is the fact that he, unlike Boromir, resists and refuses the Ring, and lets Frodo and Sam go about their business. Oh well. Everything else was pretty much on target.

I just finished reading Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk classic, Snow Crash, and it’s also pretty good. Fun, silly story set in very well-realized near-future world. Things kind of degenerate towards the end as the world loses novelty and the main character starts dividing his time between talking to a librarian and chopping off people’s limbs, but it’s still entertaining, and Stephenson is a pretty funny writer. Thanks Andy.