Some folks sitting near me at a restaurant were discussing LOTR movies (not sure which one) and that reminded me that last year was 20 years since FOTR debuted, which meant that this year it is TTT. It debuted Dec 18, 2002 so i am few days after the 20th anniversary.
Probably my least favorite of the 3 films – but I still like it and will watch at least the first disk of the extended edition tonight.
Brian
The three films- including the Two Towers- are cinematic masterpieces, especially the extended versions.
Enjoy!
I’ll always remember this one since it marks a personal low time.
I had just relocated to a new city with my fiancé to take a new job over the summer, bought our first house, and got married in the fall. She was working for a temp service. We were heavy in debt. Then right after Christmas my company closed all of it’s stores and laid off everyone and I was suddenly unemployed with a whole lot of bills to pay.
We went to see Two Towers and the feeling of utter despair and hopelessness leading up to the battle at Helm’s Deep resonated very deeply with me at the time.
I hope The Return of the King was better for you 
If it was 20 years ago that The Two Towers debuted, that means it was also around 20 years since the Extended Edition of The Fellowship of the Ring came out on DVD, and both of those things would have been a big part of my Christmas season.
I watched it two nights ago! My daughter’s fiance hadn’t ever seen them; he managed to get through the extended Fellowship and Two Towers in one session. We’ll be watching Return sometime next week.
Blows my mind that the trilogy is 2 decades old. Seems like they were released yesterday.
Yeah, the movie that skipped right past the battle of Isengard and Gandalf’s confrontation with Saruman. That was just the climactic moment of Book 3, that’s all.
Good thing it’s been twenty years. Maybe in another ten or twenty years, someone can do a decent job of putting LotR on film.
Saw them all in the theatre when they came out (in the theatre of course) and then got and watched the extended dvds when they came out. In letterbox format on a 4:3 32” tube set which was pretty common in 2004.
Fast forward to this past summer when I introduced my 16 year-old to them with the 4k blu-rays on a 77” screen. Simply stunning.
I was at a midnight screening of Two Towers and to put into perspective how much of a cultural impact Fellowship of the Ring had over the 12 months it had been out, I remember turning to my friend just before Two Towers started and saying:
“Can you believe we’re about to see a classic movie?”
We did. I think the extended cut helps Two Towers the most, but we did watch an absolutely incredible movie that night. I remember seeing Helm’s Deep for the first time and it remains an all time great film battle.
I love all three, despite some nitpicks, and saw each on the big screen as they came out. The first is the best IMHO, followed by TTT and then ROK.
I started a 20yr dedication thread to LOTR:FOTR last year:
Every time I read these kinds of mini-screeds from a True Blue Tolkienite, I simply have to wonder what kind of adaptation, exactly, would make you happy, or at least content.
As far as your specific complaint is concerned, for pacing and dramatic reasons PJ moved the Battle of Isengard to the end of the film and not the middle, while placing said wizard confrontation near the start of film 3 (in the extended version at least). So what is it that you are caviling about, again?
In more general terms, there are four possible choices to be made when it comes to adapting an element of a written work into a filmed (or televised) one:
I. Put said element into the film, unchanged
II. Put said element into the film, changed in some way
III. Leave said element out completely, or
IV. Put your own element in instead, one not found in the original work
V. Then decide WHERE in the narrative to put said element (a separate but complementary decision to the above four)
The core issue is that the element needs to work on screen, and its fidelity to the original text has to be a secondary consideration. Sorry, but that’s the way it has to be, given the significant fundamental differences between the two mediums.
I believe PJ made almost every correct decision when it came to choices I & III. Many of JRRT’s original elements simply could not be improved upon-thinking of Gandalf’s talk to Frodo about death and judgement, or Elrond’s vision of Arwen’s fate (“Nightfall in winter comes without a star”). He made those stick, and in the main they worked wonderfully.
But there were so many other of the novel’s elements that would have simply caused the film narrative to grind to a shuddering halt. For starters, Tom Bombadil, the extra machinations at the Prancing Pony, and the Scouring (the film was already suffering from ending fatigue as it was). PJ again made almost all of the correct choices here as well. My own personal regret was Treebeard drinking the Ent Draught in the moonlight, the drops falling like stars in Merry & Pippen’s eyes, an awesome cinematic moment that SURELY was going to be in the film. Oh well.
OK, the II’s. Most of time they again involved streamlining so said element wouldn’t drag the film down. Arwen replacing Glorfindel for example. So you have this glorious elven hero-who then plays absolutely no further part in the narrative. The viewer will then spend the rest of the trilogy wondering where he went and what he has been up to. [Law of Economy of Characters] It was an arguable but ultimately wise decision, also giving the viewer an extra dimension into Aragorn & Arwen’s relationship. I say this as someone who is a big Glorfindel fan note.
In other cases they worked less well, as the category blurs with the IV’s. My biggest quibble here was Treebeard being tricked by Pippen into noticing many of his trees having been cut down, something he should already be fully aware of. [Plus how did Pippen know in the first place?] It significantly weakened the character, only partly redeemed by the subsequent siege of Isengard.
The more overt IV’s are where a lot of the Tolkien fandom got on PJ’s case, and in several cases they would be correct. I was more or less neutral on Arwen coming to Aragorn in spirit as he lay half-drowned, or Faramir becoming more strident (I personally think that worked, at least until Frodo offered the Ring to the passing Nazgul-that’s going to be your inflection point?!). I did significantly dislike how they made Denethor a crazy idiot.
But those changes, whether they worked or not, don’t invalidate all of the other decisions that PJ made in adapting the books. I get the sense from these critics that they are utterly unable to give credit where credit is due, don’t grasp the vastly different needs of the two mediums, completely ignore the other types of decisions that must thus be made, and also cannot see where JRRT himself focked up-yeah sacrilege I know.
All I care about-did a given decision make the film work better, or not? It’s fidelity to the source is a relatively secondary consideration, and has to be.
[This all ignores of course how he absolutely nailed the visuals, the look of Middle Earth. Funny how these people completely gloss over that aspect.]
Yeah, maybe one day someone will make a totally 100% faithful adaptation. Yeah, it will undoubtedly be massively bloated, proceed at a snail’s pace, be painfully cringey in many ways, and be a financial disaster for whoever is foolish enough to pay for it, but you’ll finally get your wish. At best this person will make a different set of decisions, where not all of them worked either.
[Note a lot of the criticisms that have been leveled at PJ’s LotR films are much more on point when it came to the Hobbit movies and Rings of Power.]
Sorry, but I’ve never seen the extended version. My comments are based strictly on the original theatrical release.
Hey, you’re the one who’s so passionate about this that he has to write a dissertation in response to my brief comment.
Well, it was a series of things that have been building up for awhile, and your post just gave me an opportunity to vent. After watching RoP, to a certain extent I can grasp said criticism. But that is a very good example of just how badly PJ could have proceeded. Tl;dr is I think a lot of the criticism has been misplaced and unfair.