The Two Towers

Is it sacrilege to say that the movie version of The Two Towers is better than the book? Since JRRT wrote LOTR as one big book, each section of the trilogy lacks the captivating structure to which we western readers have become accustomed. The movie actually has a more interesting structure, and the ways in which Peter Jackson deviated from the canon allowed the story to have more well-defined themes.

I am unfailingly moved by this movie. I'm not exactly sure what either Tolkien or Jackson intended to say with TTT, but the themes I always pick up on are those of loyalty, and honor, and living up to one's promises and duty even if they are centuries or even millenia old, living up to one's promises and obligations even if they could have reasonably been overlooked and forgiven even by the beneficiaries thereof. How could one not love the arrival of the elves to Helm's Deep, in all of their smirking condescension, knowing that they were squandering idyllic immortality in a lost cause because once, countless human lifetimes before, they promised they would come to the defense of Man when needed. I don't care if it's fiction, that's some powerful stuff.

That's the kind of sentiment that led United State to send her soldiers to spill blood on the fields of Flanders and the shores of Normandy. Modern Americans love to decry France for its largely undeserved reputation of 20th century capitulation- it was less a case of willing collaboration than it was like an instance of a beautiful woman, her fears having been laughed off by her friends and neighbors, waking up one day with her sociopathic stalker neighbor in her bedroom with a bayonet at her carotid. Twice. Some Americans, at least, recall that France once came to the aid of this distant English colony with delusions of nationhood, providing arms, troops, and materiel that tipped the Revolutionary War from a colonial inconvenience to one of the few and most successful revolutions the world has ever seen. If it weren't for the French, we'd still probably be speaking English to this very day.

Anyhow, I like TTT and its theme of remembering and keeping promises, doing one's duty, living with honor, and sticking by one's friends. I also find Theodin, the broken subsequently redeemed king of Rohan, to be the most captivating character of the entire saga.

(Yes, I know that Flanders is in Belgium. We still entered the war to help the French, among other nations.)