The Lord of the Rings:
The Two Towers
Special Extended DVD Edition

The movies have been changed profoundly by DVDs.  DVDs have become the end product rather than the ancillary product of the filmmaking process, and this is altering the way filmmakers approach their art.  The theatrical run of a film has become the marketing run for the DVD, and if a movie’s production and promotional costs are covered by the box office receipts, or even just almost covered, then it is the DVDs that reap the profits for the movie studios.  The DVD also becomes the filmmakers’ memento of the year or years they spent working on the film, and a director is more likely to compromise his or her artistic vision for a theatrical release, knowing it can be retrieved when the less ephemeral DVD is issued.  Or, as in the case with Peter Jackson’s cinematic masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings movies, a film’s artistic achievement can be deliberately platformed to peak with the creation of the DVD.

As they did last year with The Lord of the Rings The Fellowship of the Rings, Jackson and New Line Home Entertainment have created a monumental New Line Platinum Series boxed set for the second installment of the trilogy, The Lord of the Rings The Two Towers Special Extended DVD Edition (N6504, $40).  Like the ‘extended’ Fellowship of the Rings, the 223-minute Two Towers Extended Edition is a very different movie than the theatrical version of The Two Towers, which was also released on DVD and ran 179 minutes.  The shorter version is designed, rather brilliantly, for theatrical release.  There are spectacular action scenes at regular intervals and a tight narrative that pulls you rapidly from one situation to the next.  Had the Extended Edition appeared in theaters, critics would have decried the tedium of the narrative and audiences would have been suitably restless.  But, having been exposed to the theatrical release, it is much easier to give the Extended Edition its chance.  You know those astounding action scenes are coming, and meanwhile the story starts filling in more fascinating information about the characters, the political conflicts, the land, and the environment.  It has more time to digress for a humorous incident or a really cool moment, and very quickly, there is no turning back.  The theatrical version of The Two Towers is not an abridged travesty, but it can seem that way once you’ve watched the longer version.  There’s just so much more substance, so much more life to it.  Even the horse that rescues the hero, when he is separated from his comrades after a battle, has a history, so that what seems like a random convenience in the theatrical movie is, instead, a goosebumpy moment of recognition in the Extended Edition. 

And, as was the case with the extended Fellowship DVD, the four-platter Two Towers Extended Edition is also a monumental DVD, every bit as enthralling and valuable as Fellowship was.  The film is split to two platters, in letterboxed format only, with an aspect ratio of about 2.35:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback.  The color transfer is identical to the transfer on the theatrical release, except that the bit transfer rate appears to be a notch or two lower at times.  The film utilizes different lighting schemes in different situations, adding or draining color to affect a mood, and the DVD conveys each shift in tone precisely.

The theatrical version had an outstanding 5.1-channel Dolby Digital soundtrack with EX-encoding, and the Extended Edition replicates that track, but it also features a DTS track with ES-encoding, which delivers crisper, weightier sounds.  In some instances, a suggestion of a directional noise on the Dolby Digital track will be more specific and recognizable on the DTS track.  The bass is also more flavorful.  There are optional English and Spanish subtitles (“Nostros juramos servir al seńor del Tesoro.”).

As with Fellowship, there are four commentary tracks, all of which remain highly informative and satisfying, especially the first track, which features Jackson and fellow screenwriters Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens.  They talk about the adaptation of the story and mixing the three separate plotlines, about the development of the various design concepts, about the sets and locations and about what happened during the shooting of the film.  Whether it is because the material is so majestic to begin with or because the same artistry that is reflected in the film’s creation is also reflected in their effort on the track, the talk is outstanding.  It is reflective, funny, intelligent and responsive to the movie’s many nuances.

“It’s fun to shoot scenes that are lifted straight out of the book.  While we adapt the book and we change things and we alter things and we do that quite a lot, occasionally you just hit those moments that are iconic moments that you want to just jump out of the page of the book directly.

“Ian [McKellen] is wearing a rubber nose, if you didn’t realize.  It’s one of the things I remember having a bit of an argument with him about at the very beginning when he arrived in New Zealand because you imagine you’re an actor, you come to New Zealand to play a character for fifteen months over three films, and you have this discussion about whether you should wear a rubber nose or not.  If you do, you’re going to have to get up two hours earlier in the morning every day for fifteen months and go have your nose glued on.  It wasn’t so much a debate whether the nose was a good idea or not, because we did do a test and he did look good in his nose, but he was very much against the idea of doing it because what it would mean for the next year and a half, but fortunately, Ian being a very incredibly generous actor, he put up a spirited argument and then gave up.

“It’s always very difficult to have waterfalls in films because from a sound point of view, the noise that the waterfall makes is a horrible, roaring kind of white noise, and when you’re mixing the soundtrack you never kind of quite know how much waterfall to have, because even though it’s right behind them, it’s a very irritating sound and so you tend to sort of push the waterfall right down low so you don’t distract from the dialog that’s being spoken.

“One day [the model supervisor] brought us to this particular miniature that they’d been building and I looked at it and I said, ‘Why have you got two gates?’ and he said, ‘That’s what you’d written,’ and I realized that we’d done a typo, because of course it’s the ‘Black Gate,’ not ‘Gates,’ but that’s because of a typo and that’s how they became two.

“It’s always hard to do peasants in films.  You always think of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  Monty Python has been a real difficulty with us making this film because you realize just how close the line is between The Holy Grail and The Lord of the Rings really is in terms of what we’re trying to do and show on screen.”

Although the track has third billing, it is best to listen to the ‘production/post-production team,’ commentary next.  The fifteen speakers, some sitting together and some recorded individually, discuss many different aspects of the film’s creation in a highly accessible and often vivid manner.

“At the point when the bad guys come in and invade this little clutch of huts and whatnot, we set one of them on fire for real, on location, and it kept burning for so long we ended up burning it to the ground.  A lot of the extras and stuff were told to just keep acting to just keep going for it, and they kind of got a little bit out of control and started throwing a lot of the props and set dressing and stuff into the fire, and a lot of the art department kept, you know, trying to stay off camera, were kind of nervously waving at them, saying, ‘No, don’t, don’t pick up that basket and throw it in there.’

“People talk about what a big deal it is that [Jackson] made three films at once, but what they don’t realize is he made about six or seven films at once, because everything of significance had to be shot, or a significant amount of things had to be shot, at least twice.  At least twice.  With all the scale doubling and the fakery and everything, the fact that it’s comprehensible, much less good, much less great, is amazing.  It’s really an astonishing feat.  I mean, it would be an astonishing feat if it wasn’t any good, you know?  Much less, a classic.”

The ‘design team’ commentary, featuring seven speakers, is more technically oriented, though it is still fully engaging.  It focuses primarily on the execution of the special effects. 

“It is interesting in the design of Gollum.  The hair seems such an insignificant part of his design, but if you remove the hair off his character, he instantly becomes quite alien-like, and by adding the hair, it adds a human element back into the character, an element that wouldn’t naturally be seen in designs done of alien-like characters.  The hair is an integral and incredibly important part of the validity of the design of Gollum.

“One of the most difficult things in trying to create The Lord of the Rings was to give the feeling that hundreds of years of craftsmanship had been brought to bear on the cultures and the construction and the architecture that you see through the film.  The problem is, of course, that you only have days, and if lucky, weeks.

“The only way to visualize so many elements of Middle Earth is to put in less, and not more, because the less you define something the more you allow the spectator to actually bring in what he feels is appropriate and apt.  You have to make so many decisions which irrevocably fill up the viewer’s gaze, and it’s very hard to leave these open spaces for the viewer to actually fill the image in.  I hate illustrations where everything is crammed with detail.  It’s like standing in front of a wall instead of standing in front of a door or a window, you can’t walk through, you can’t look through, you can’t find your way in.  I find that to be incredibly frustrating, and piling on detail is a reaction to not being able to define it by a more astute means.  To decide what to put in rather than just putting in as much as you can is much more difficult.  But it has to be very instinctive, and if you’re fortunate, then you’ve made the right guess, but to block people out by over-attention to detail is just wrong.”

Finally, there is a cast commentary, with sixteen different speakers.  Elijah Wood, Sean Astin and Andy Serkis are grouped together, but the others, such as Christopher Lee and John Rhys-Davies, are recorded separately.  The track is naturally less substantive than the others, though it is also more amusing and still contains plenty of interesting anecdotes and revelations about the shoot, along with the enthusiasms of having participated in a great event.

“This is one of my favorite things in the movie, too.  That’s my favorite thing, as a history student, and someone who’s traveled the world and going into museums and appreciating history as it’s represented visually in paintings.  Seeing [a painting of a character] in this movie and really drawing out that idea that what we love about it is that it’s almost historical, it’s not just fantastic.  I mean, it is fantastic, but this is a way to basically say, to own that idea, to just take complete and total control of it and say the lines should be totally blurred for the viewer.  You know, you should be invested in the characters’ sense of their own sense of their own personal, real history, you know, and how that’s been mythologized for them.  I just love that.  And maps!  I can’t get enough of these maps.

“I think that, unquestionably, part of the success has been the support of the fans.  The support of the fans could have been destroyed in the very first film, if they had sensed that they were being short-changed.  Part of Peter’s great achievement is to convince the fans that the truth of the proposition is that he is a fan himself, and once they realized that they were in good hands, somebody who was not going to throw away bits of the book because he didn’t value them or anything like that, and they accepted the fact that in making this recension of this enormous novel, you have to make sacrifices, you have to make choices.”

(By the time the commentaries are over, incidentally, you become acutely aware of the parameters of a New Zealand accent, which essentially turns every vowel sound into a short ‘i.’)

Again, as was the case with Fellowship, the second two platters contain extensive behind-the-scenes materials and documentaries on the creation of the film.  The menus on these platters are confusing, offering ‘Play All’ options that don’t really ‘play all’ as well as options obscured by the ‘Play All’ option, and the guide provided as a jacket insert isn’t all that helpful.  In relation to most overblown menus accompanying blockbuster films, the response times are at least speedy.  Except for what is necessary in the orientation of a specific topic, redundancy in the documentaries and the commentaries is minimal.

The first platter holds three basic documentaries that run a total of 179 minutes.  The first looks at author J.R.R. Tolkien, providing some fresh insight on his efforts (he apparently created his walking trees over frustration with the copout ‘walking’ Birnham Wood in Macbeth), and goes over the alterations and planning that went into devising the story.  The second looks at many aspects of the film’s production design, including scouting locations, creating make up and costumes, and building armor and other props.  The last segment looks at the creation of the animated character, Gollum, a story that is worth repeating.  Serkis was called in to audition for the character’s voice, but the filmmakers videotaped him and found his facial expressions so compelling that they stopped work on the character and redesigned him using aspects of Serkis as a model.  Additionally, Jackson was so excited about Serkis’ performance that he hired him to work with the actors.  Serkis would perform in a scene with the actors first, and then the scene would be shot again without him, so the animators could use his complete performance to guide their designs and the other actors would have someone real to play against.  It wasn’t a system that was planned in advance, but one that was developed on the fly to accommodate strengths of artistic expression as those strengths materialized.  (The current blather about Ellen DeGeneres possibly being nominated for an Oscar in a supporting role for her work on Finding Nemo seems trifling when compared to the remarkable and unquestionably award-worthy effort Serkis rose to perform.)

Also featured on the first supplemental platter is a 2-minute comparison scene, showing Serkis performing in one panel and the final animation in another; a 3-minute piece about one of the film’s producers, who also had to stand in for the character in a couple places, to the derision of everyone involved; a 14-minute segment, tied to a map of New Zealand, that shows how each location was scouted and utilized; a very good 18-minute sequence, this time tied to a map of the film’s fantasy land, that delineates the journeys each group of characters takes; and hundreds of design stills, often with informative audio commentaries, depicting the development of characters, sets, and props.

The documentaries on the second platter run 215 minutes and cover the music, the special effects, training for stunts, the wrap up, and an hour on various anecdotes of unusual occurrences during the shoot.  The best segments are on the editing, explaining how the choices were made and what the process of the editing was like, and the always fun segment on sound effects (Jackson visited a cricket stadium and had the attendees read some crowd scene lines in unison).  There is also an amusing minute-long presentation of makeshift animated storyboards (often using found objects) for the scene where the dam breaks, and more still gallery segments, again accompanied by brief commentaries, of production photos and conceptual drawings of miniatures, effects and unused concepts.  In both the commentary and the documentaries, Jackson and others talk about removing Lee’s final scene from the film, because it would fit better into the beginning of the third film, though by all reports that may not have turned out to be its final resting place.

There is a poignant emphasis throughout the supplementary materials upon how much Tolkien’s writing was influenced by the carnage of World War I and how the movie, although it is set in a fantasy world, can serve as a reflection upon the rise of technology and industrialization in the 20th Century.  The irony is that the movie itself, while exploring the negative aspects of progress, exemplifies what is good about that same technological advancement, a triumph, through film and video, of the forces of light over the forces of darkness.

- November 30, 2003

Indiana Jones Adventures
 Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
 Finding Nemo
 Halloween Resurrection
Blue Crush
 Matrix Reloaded
 The Lion King
 8 Mile
Gods & Generals
Bowling for Columbine
 Chicago
 The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
 Straw Dogs
There's Something About Mary
 Black Hawk Down
 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea
 Once Upon A Time In America
 Gangs Of New York
 Treasure Planet
Giant
Windtalkers
 Die Another Day
 War & Peace
 Eraserhead 
Hearts & Minds 

- by Douglas Pratt

 

Douglas Pratt's DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter is published monthly.
For a free sample, call (516)594-9304 or go to his website at www.DVDLaser.com

 

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