Classic CC2K: The Two Towers Strike Back

OK, now onto the 90 minutes of inspired invention. Go back to the Towers novel, and you’ll easily find the one spot where they inserted the most stuff: the journey from Edoras to Helm’s Deep. In the novel, that trip takes up maybe a couple pages and leads straight into the Helm’s Deep battle. In the movie, the journey to Helm’s Deep and lead-up to the battle are far more complicated. Here are a few of the events they inserted/made up/amplified:

1. The attack of the warg riders.
2. The whole Aragorn falling off a cliff/getting lost/dreaming about Arwen thing.
3. Eowyn and Aragorn chatting about how old Aragorn is.
4. Lots of infighting: Aragorn has individual fights with Legolas, Theoden and Eowyn. During the warg rider battle, Theoden stays to fight and instructs Eowyn to “lead the people to Helm’s Deep.”
5. Aragorn showing that young Rohanian kid how to use a sword and reassuring him that there’s still hope.
6. The “where is the horse and the rider” bit I mentioned earlier.

And that’s only a selection from that one storyline! There’s inspired invention in the Sam/Frodo/Gollum storyline, too, which I’ll address in a moment. Earlier I said that Jackson and company “flat-out made up” most of the new material in Towers, but I was wrong to say that, because I hadn’t yet discovered the phrase I found while writing this: inspired invention.

The new material in Towers — along with other such tweaks throughout the movies — are inspired invention because Jackson and company rounded out, bulked up or otherwise repaired Tolkien’s masterwork by using Tolkien’s masterwork as their guide and muse. Need a speech for Theoden to give while being outfitted for battle? Use the “where is the horse and the rider?” song. Need a battle between Edoras and Helm’s Deep? Bring out the wargs — great creatures that Tolkien alluded to in the text, but never brought onstage. Need to develop the Aragorn/Arwen romance, even though they spend most of the damn LOTR cycle apart from each other? Add an Aragorn-in-distress storyline and dip into the extensive appendices of the novels for inspiration for a dream sequence to bring them together.

I must also praise Jackson and company for having the elves fuckin’ represent at Helm’s Deep. This choice — to add the elves to a battle they simply missed in the original novel — dovetails with a larger character whose arc they fleshed out: Elrond, who starts the movies as defeatist crank and winds up siding with humans and life, not only by dispatching Haldir and the Lorien elves to Helm’s Deep — at least I think that’s what Galadriel’s elven shortwave communique midway through Towers is supposed to suggest — but by also giving his blessing to the marriage of Aragorn and Arwen.

As for why Tolkien decided to omit the elves from Helm’s Deep, I have no idea. Maybe he felt like Legolas was enough of a representation from the race. Maybe he was already pursuing his larger theme of change; in this case, the change of power in middle-Earth from elves and other magical folk to men. But while I don’t think the lack of elves at Helm’s Deep is as grave an error as Faramir’s character — if the lack of elves is an error at all — I found Jackson’s choice to include them to be deeply satisfying and demonstrative of the kind of gentle repair he and his colleagues made on Tolkien’s original text.

Let’s address two more key points of inspired invention, both from the two hobbit storylines, one a more explicit repair, the other an inspired choice.

Merry, Pippin and the Ents: In the book, Gandalf says that Merry and Pippin’s arrival in Fangorn Forest would be like two small pebbles starting an avalanche. And, indeed, the hobbit’s presence and interaction with the Ents does cause them to move around some, which leads them to discover Saruman’s treachery and destroy Isengard.

But as a reader, I’ve always found Merry and Pippin to be frustratingly underwritten. Hell, I can’t even tell them apart until Merry helps Eowyn slay the Witch King, and 30 seconds after I read that, I forget again. Pippin does precisely dick throughout the entire story, and then I think someone falls on him during the Pelennor fields battle. Jackson and company rectify this by taking Tolkien’s original intention — that Merry and Pippin would be like pebbles starting an avalanche — and amplifies their role in the story by having Merry explicitly suggest to Treebeard to turn south, where he and his Ent friends would see Saruman’s destruction of the forest. (Non-Towers-related side note: Jackson also makes Pippin a far more satisfying character by having him help light the Beacon of Amon Din to alert Rohan, and by having him play a bigger role in rescuing Faramir from Denethor’s self-immolation.) None of these changes can completely repair Tolkien’s bad writing — but some good directorial choices and great performances certainly help.

Frodo, Sam and Faramir: So, as I implied earlier, Jackson and company crafted a new climax for their film of Towers that resolves three main storylines:

1. The good guys win at Helm’s Deep.
2. The Ents destroy Isengard.
3. Faramir releases Frodo, Sam and Gollum.

These three events happen concurrently, with a voice-over-Oscar-clip speech from Sean Astin’s Sam Gamgee. Remember when I said that the Towers movie featured inspired invention? Jackson and company joyously drown their climax with inspired invention just like the Ents drown the forges of Isengard. Sam’s Big Speech comes from a pretty innocuous scene in the novel. I think they’re camping or something, and Sam starts to talk about how they’re in a great tale. The idea pops up again throughout the rest of the books, but Jackson and company took Sam’s perfectly pleasant speech and set its key theme — “the tales that really mattered” — against a backdrop of simple heroism overcoming impossible odds. Sam delivers this speech while we watch Gandalf and Eomer arrive to save the day at Helm’s Deep and the Ents destroy Isengard. Jackson and company take a simple speech and apply it to a great theme — and it works. Oh, does it work. It works gloriously. Keep in mind that Faramir hears this speech, and after hearing it, and watching Frodo put a sword to his best friend’s neck, and after hearing that Boromir died because he tried to take the ring … Faramir releases them. And it is only because Jackson and company took the time and inspiration to so gloriously invent the Faramir flashback, do we truly get to see the entire struggle that Tolkien put into Faramir’s eyes when he longingly looked at the ring.

Tolkien should have shown us that journey. Jackson just gave him some help.

Lance, I hope this gives you a better idea of my argument. I eagerly await your response.

— Tony Lazlo

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