2002 – Peter Jackson
Re-Watched October 16, 2019
The light shines at the beginning of a dark new day
“What can men do against such reckless hate?”
The Two Towers is where the experience of watching the world succumb to a Second World War interacts with the remembrance of the first. Fellowship creates a world before and after the emergence of evil; Two Towers firmly entrenches the viewer in the horror of the reckless hate that blind evil creates. The film serves as a lesson in goodness and how that value cannot exist unless it is protected vigilantly and without reservation.
I know that many fans of the book feel that the film makers’ go at the story was lacking Tolkien’s eloquence. However, all the films show a heart that would have made Tolkien proud, especially Sam’s final tear-wrenching speech about the good in this world. His words are a direct answer to Theoden’s question above: fight to the end, for ruin and goodness, for love and mercy’s sake, to die as a good person or forever regret not trying.
The idea of trying in the face of whatever odds there may be reminds me of one of my favorite films, F for Fake: when discussing La Sagrada Familia, the famous unfinished basilica in Barcelona, Orson Welles says “Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash – the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we’re going to die. ‘Be of good hear,’ cry the dead artists out of the living past. ‘Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing.'”