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. 

Crimes of the Future

Writer-director David Cronenberg's latest, Crimes of the Future, begins with a child hunkering down beneath a bathroom sink to tuck into the pink plastic bin that usually occupies that space. As he feasts, a thick white drool dangles from his mouth. Later we learn that this frothy sputum is caustic, an evolutionary advantage that will allow a new sub-species of humankind to consume and digest the synthetic trash that is crammed into every corner of our world. In the moment though, Sozos Sotiris' Brecken registers as a perfectly concealed Brundlefly - the mutant off-shot able to summon up corrosive digestive enzymes at will. This feeling of summation is threaded throughout Crimes: the mind-warping agenda of extreme, sensationalist, art from Videodrome rubs up against the pearlescent bio-mechanoids of eXistenZ; Shivers' mix of sex and surgery runs concurrent to failing attempts, by boring bureaucrats, to catalogue violent metamorphosis. The latter straight out of Scanners. 

Set in and around an art world dedicated to euphoric body modification, Viggo Mortensen's Saul Tenser and Léa Seydoux's Caprice are a double-act of critically appreciated performance artists. Saul is the canvas, Caprice the brush. Although we are told that pain and infection have largely been eliminated in this oddly Mediterranean present, Saul writhes in agony throughout the film. Unlike his partner, who can hold steaming skillets and must voluntarily alter her appearance, Saul's body is constantly undergoing twisting transformation. His insides give birth to new, unknown organs that are assumed to be vestigial and potentially tumourous. Cocooned in a operating bed that looks like a cross between the sarcophagus of a deep-sea monarch and a caterpillar's chrysalis, Saul submits himself to Caprice's surgical tinkering for the amusement of the champagne and canapés set. Even Saul's attempts to feed himself primary-coloured mush requires a soothing, swishing, skeletal apparatus - one designed to simulate the movements that a body locked in choking dysphagia has otherwise grown unaccustomed to. 

Beneath this new flesh garnish though, Crimes revolves around the sickly tension present in interpersonal incidents with clear hierarchical tiers - pitching and networking as an uncommon horror that demands artists pluck out their trembling insides then place them under someone else's microscope. In this sense Crimes treads similar ground to Cronenberg's earlier film Maps to the Stars. Whereas in that film the status that comes with fame allowed for a childish and chronic misbehaviour, Crimes examines these interactions from a perspective coloured by advancing age. Saul is elderly and established, unconsciously cooking up new projects in a mad rush to produce before his collapsing body begins its path to conclusion. In Crimes then the revulsion is generated not just by largely bloodless scenes of autopsy but by an overly appreciative audience, desperate to win any kind of favour with Saul. A scene with Kristen Stewart's Timlin, a junior staff member with the National Organ Registry, sees the young woman attempting to seduce Saul but, in practice, her overly enthusiastic regard is shown to be suffocating. Saul cannot help physically retreating from her fawning broadcasts, covering his mouth and face with his hands before, finally, conclusively ruining the mood by declaring that he is sexually inadequate.