The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

Although The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers picks up exactly where The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring left off, the two films have surprisingly distinct visual identities. Fellowship, with its hobbit holes and winding, Escher staircases could - when not hurrying away from such images - present moods premised on these fantastical, often hand-crafted environments. Viewers were able to sink into the crevices. The Two Towers, by comparison, is a much more expansive, horizontal experience; a film about great, galloping journeys and never-ending plains that builds to the siege of an enormous hold chiseled into a mountain. Whereas before characters looked like tourists miserably coping with a destination holiday at the ends of the earth, here the warrior heroes find themselves hurrying between homesteads while the countryside around them boils with brewing conflict. The Two Towers then owing far more than expected to the widescreen vistas of American westerns or the arrow-flecked turbulence of Japanese chanbara. 

Perhaps because we're already well aware of their overarching objectives, the surviving members of The Company of the Ring recede into the background for significant stretches of The Two Towers. Writer-director Peter Jackson - Stephen Sinclair, who previously collaborated with Jackson on Meet the Feebles and Braindead, joining Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens as co-writers - apportions space to two characters who chart paths into and out of damnation: Andy Serkis' motion-captured Gollum and the late Bernard Hill as the enfeebled King Théoden. Gollum, who acts as a guide into hell for Elijah Wood's Frodo and Sean Astin's Sam, struggles with distinct and even warring personalities, each with markedly different outlooks. A rapid-fire back-and-forth between the piteous Sméagol and the more conniving, ring hungry Gollum, as the two aspects weigh up their options, is both impressive and humorous. But, equally, watching this computer-generated body splash along a shallow river after a slippery fish is actually able to evoke a vivid physical trepidation. We are acutely aware that the sallow, vulnerable skin of this creature is dangerously close to some sharp-looking rocks. That injury doesn't occur (or, more accurately, couldn't occur) isn't the point. The shots, despite their falsehood, prickle shivering sense memory in their audience. 

Hill's Théoden awakens out of a crumbling, mummified half-life (shades of The Fisher King from Arthurian legend or King Arthur himself, as depicted in the latter half of John Boorman's Excalibur) and is instantly thrown into the tragedy of having lost his child. Hill's performance isn't showy, he doesn't rage or even really demand attention in successive scenes where his character must make the most of a truly dire lot. What the actor offers instead is a quiet, resurgent dignity steeped in age and doubt. Viggo Mortensen's otherworldly Aragorn may be pegged for greatness but it is Hill's Théoden who, despite the enormous responsibility this older man has woken up into, is able to consistently transmit a seasoned, kingly temperament. Which is to say that as the situation worsens, as greater armies of mutant Orcs bear down on this harried community, Hill's Théoden isn't seen to buckle. Instead he seems to grow bigger and bigger in his role as a front-line commander, defying the patriarchal standards of his time to place faith in his niece, Miranda Otto's Éowyn, and fighting side-by-side with his knights - knowing that are all likely doomed - as they blockade creaking fortifications. This rain-lashed Battle of Helm's Deep still staggers, thanks largely to the sheer amount of onscreen bodies, both living and computer-generated, who crash upon this fortress. Director Jackson demonstrating an ability to build entire acts out of concluding action that account for scope, subtlety, and character. A shot that simulates a camera arm, fixed to a vehicle, rolling as it follows behind mounted riders as they batter through waves of armoured ogres has a genuine note of delirium about it. 

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Revisited in its theatrical cut, director Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is still an impressive achievement in compressed storytelling, an approach that makes the film's three hour runtime feel positively breakneck. In adapting JRR Tolkien's first volume of The Lord of the Rings Jackson, along with co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, have jettisoned characters and situations, as well as borrowed events from later books, to arrive at a piece that is largely built around two characters - Elijah Wood's Frodo and Viggo Mortensen's Aragorn - both of whom are slowly being crushed by expectation. For Frodo it's a pressure that he has, to some degree, chosen to take on himself. Although, as Ian McKellen's Gandalf pontificates, Frodo is uniquely suited to meet this call to adventure, it is this young hobbit who stands amongst squabbling giants at Rivendell and volunteers himself to transport a ring of incredible, corrupting power across the world to be dropped into a volcano. 

Frodo, and the rest of the halfling members of this expedition for that matter, are positioned as cheery innocents who, in attempting to repeat the storied quests of their forebears, find themselves journeying deeper and deeper into an all-encompassing horror. It isn't difficult then to draw parallels between the residents of the green and pleasant Hobbiton and the British Tommies who left their homes to be gobbled up by a new kind of warfare on French fields during the Great War. Both are, popularly, framed as guileless and therefore massively unprepared for what awaits them abroad. Tolkien, presumably, twisting his own flea-bitten experience of pulverising modernity at the Somme to ask what conflict could possibly be worth all this bloodshed and destruction? Threat in this first installment then is organised in terms of the technological, specifically generated by a vassal state transforming itself into an industrial hub. Christopher Lee's fallen wizard Saruman, who believes it politically expedient to align himself with a returning spectre, orders his underlings to overturn ancient trees and churn up the earth beneath them until this sorcerer's  domain is cast in mud and smoke; an enormous warren of intersecting tunnels where roughly hewn armour and mutant hordes each tumble off a production line. 

In a wider realm spotted with the crumbled remains of advanced civilisations, Saruman's excavation registers as obscene - the willful destruction of a formerly picturesque, fantasy landscape for selfish or even cowardly ends. This is war as a seismic disturbance. A blot that threatens to, should the ghostly Sauron regain his full strength, engulf everything. Whereas Frodo's suitability to smuggle this crucial ring is largely illustrated through comparison - several much more obviously powerful men shudder to even touch the thing - rather than stated exposition, Aragorn's royal lineage, and the weight that carries, is directly spoken to us on several occasions. Perhaps, given his cool nickname and proficiency in a fight, the screenwriters worried that an audience unfamiliar with the original text (or overfamiliar with the Neanderthal seen in Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings) might assume that the character is a heavy and nothing more? Certainly Mortensen's performance consistently works against any such dismissal, tempering whirlwind sword skills with a tender, fatherly nature that suggests a greatness on the cusp of being assumed. This insistence that we know Aragorn is descended from fickle human kings introduces a note of doubt about his motives as well. Will he be able to overcome the innate, reflexive treachery of man and be a true ally to Frodo? 

More than anything though, what remains specifically appealing about Jackson's approach to Fellowship is that this piece arrived before green screen and computer generated effects became a ubiquitous answer to filmmaking problems. Jackson, who made his bones on low budget horror (if not splatter) films threads this first instalment with similarly inventive compositional solutions. Since this is a world that demands people and objects of varying sizes are interacting with each other, there is a constant need to find fresh viewpoints as a way of concealing the scaffolding beneath them. So although CG is frequently deployed it sits alongside detailed and expansive sets, life-sized puppetry, forced perspectives, and (reportedly maximal) miniature environments. Regardless of whether or not it should be the case, these physical - touchable - effects are better suited to stressing an idea of human craftsmanship and ingenuity than purely digital compositions. If big budget blockbuster entertainment is a series of magic tricks deployed in service to a hair-raising story, then a variety and depth in the execution of these deceptions is best suited to the task of consistently delighting an audience. None of this is to say that Fellowship is perfect - at least in this edit the truncated shape of the central journey, one told primarily in gigantic establishing shots, begins to feel less like a grueling odyssey and more like a succession of bullet points, as if favoured locales are being ticked off - but Jackson's opening salvo cannot help but register as a laudable example of large-scale filmmaking that foregrounds the kaleidoscopic disciplines that underpin such massive endeavours. 

The Four Musketeers (The Revenge of Milady)

The second half of Richard Lester's Alexandre Dumas adaptation doesn't have the best start. The Four Musketeers (The Revenge of Milady) begins with a lengthy recap of the first part before plunging headfirst into a war between Catholic France and insurrectionist Protestants (backed by England) that has made allies out of former foes. This rough gear shift is matched by an assembly that makes enormous leaps in location; a structural restlessness that - if we're being generous - does echo the fidget energies that pour out of Michael York's D'Artagnan. To Lester's film credit, when it does settle down Four Musketeers finds itself more excited about charting the homicidal pettiness of Faye Dunaway's wonderful take on Milady than it does the adventures of a young swashbuckler. That this spy is capricious and vengeful is an understatement. She lives to be adored: Milady enjoying and luxuriating in the power imbalance that her beauty both implies and ensures. Perhaps there are deeper motives in play in The Four Musketeers when it comes to Milady's studied hatred of D'Artagnan and his mistress, Raquel Welch's Constance? If that is the case, we are not privy to them. 

A greater familiarity with Dumas' text might reveal some crumb of logic powering the murderous machinations of the literary Milady but the through line here seems to be one of pure spite. Dunaway's performance reeks of jealousy. She flattered the socially inferior D'Artagnan with her physical affections and is appalled that he not only rejected her (moments after having slept with her) but did so out of his desire for another woman. There's a sense that because D'Artagnan thwarted Milady in her attempts to overwhelm and intoxicate, that a correction is now demanded. Does she believe that the murder of Constance changes something in her and D'Artagnan's relationship? Will he finally submit himself wholly to her insidious charms? We see elsewhere the intended effects of the sexuality that Milady wields so effectively. Captured by the British, her heaving bosom is enough to ensnare a pompous and puritanical jailor, setting him up to be the useful idiot in a political assassination plot. Matching Dunaway for unexpected (and therefore enjoyable) turbulence is Oliver Reed as Athos. The actor glowers, suggesting a three-dimensionality of character largely through a nagging sense of distraction. He talks to the other Musketeers but never truly looks at them. He's staring off into space; his attentions elsewhere and, obviously, churning. 

As with the first instalment, The Three Musketeers, characters are dressed throughout in their finery, requiring that the actors puppeteering these enormous outfits exert incredible amounts of energy just to get the layered petticoats and embroidered tabards moving. Rather than shy away with rapid cutting, Lester embraces this awkwardness of motion, making it a key component in all of the film's lengthy and largely observed swordfights. Panting duellists must cope with the frustrations and exhaustions inherent to their ostentatious dress. Mishaps and accidents are equally allowed to exert themselves on the unfolding dramas, complicating and enhancing the film's exhilarating sense of drunken danger. That The Four Musketeers takes place during a war has constant purchase within Lester's mise en scene too, one that extends beyond the establishing shots of ruined chateaus or billowing cannon lines. The Three Musketeers featured a series of animated tableaus in which members of the thoughtless ruling class battered through the slogging efforts of a downtrodden (and mumbling) working class. Four Musketeers takes the same basic unexamined toil concept but tweaks the parameters, allowing for far more callous scenery. An absurd picnic, attended by Charlton Heston's Cardinal Richelieu and Geraldine Chaplin's Queen Anne, comes complete with a portable organ built into a horse carriage and, in the near distance, several Protestants dangling from a hanging tree. No reveller bats an eyelid. The beautiful people chat and snack on without interruption. It's a sight gag that wouldn't be out of place in Ken Russell's similarly excellent The Devils. 

007 - The Man with the Golden Gun

Nine films in the James Bond series is running on pure cynicism. Ian Fleming's The Man with the Golden Gun was a slight, unfinished novel that saw a compromised 007 shipped off to Jamaica on a suicide mission. Since this is only Moore's second adventure, obsolescence doesn't really fit the bill so Fleming's story about a KGB sanctioned pimp is reorganised into a dreary, unconvincing travelogue that occasionally allows Bond to peck at a dark twin played by Christopher Lee. Scaramanga resides in a pocket universe of tropical islands accented with nightmarish carnival violence, his residence a gaudy mash of low-art and new money living. The big idea being that this would be Bond if he gave into avarice and auctioned off his talents to the highest bidder.

Scaramanga is 007 tracked to the terrifying conclusion of an undead monster residing within a state-of-the-art mausoleum. This concept is good but it would work a little better if Lee's pistolero was reflecting off a particularly virtuous interpretation of Bond but, unfortunately, he isn't. Screenwriters Tom Mankiewicz and Richard Maibaum have written a Bond so indistinguishable from his enemy that when 007 starts sniping at Scaramanga for his amorality it registers as sanctimonious. Perhaps that's the point? Regardless, Golden Gun's Bond is a sadistic control freak who delights in his ability to dominate women both physically and mentally. In a film series not exactly noted for its chivalry, Golden Gun still manages to stand out with a hero that threatens to snap a helpless women's arm one minute, then is breaking out the bubbly to seduce her the next. Moore's performance manages to be both smarmy and robotic, a man so completely drained of charm that his see-sawing mood comes across as manic and psychotic rather than rakish.