The Two Towers

Just a thought. This morning I realised that I'd left both 'battered' and 'legless' off my drunken thesaurus. 135 words of phrases that imply drunkeness. Frightening.

I saw The Two Towers last night. I couldn't help but wonder whether Legolas gets legless... there's definitely a joke there somewhere. There's also some mileage to be got over how plump Sam is. He's trekked from the Shire to Rivendell, over the Misty Mountains, through Moria, into Lothlorien, and all the way to the fringes of Mordor, all apparently on a diet of toast, and he's still really plump. How? Okay, it's obviously not toast, but it looks like it. Lembas bread or something. There's also a spectacularly absurd bit with an enormous army of horsemen charge downhill, attacking an army below. The hill was nearly vertical. I kept thinking if even one horse fell, there'd be an avalanche of horses and men. Still, as Groucho Marks once said, 'Avalanche is better than no lanch at all.' The military historian in me kept screaming out during the battle scenes that so much was ludicrous or just incredibly unlikely. But I kept my mouth shut. I kept my eyes shut at one point too, it must be said. I fell asleep for about ten minutes, almost an hour in.

Which is no criticism of the film; I clearly needed some sleep, and having grabbed some I was hooked for the rest of the film. I really enjoyed it - it was very funny, with lots of great one liners, and the battle scenes, of which there are no shortage, were spectacular. Gollum was fabulous, and the Ents were about as good as they could possibly have been. Fritz Leiber, almost certainly the greatest fantasy writer of the last century, used to think that they were probably the best thing in the book; certainly, he felt, they were the most 'fantastic'. The film looked beautiful too, of course, frequently seeming as though Alan Lee's paintings had come alive, and the big swooping helicopter shots of people moving through the landscape were stunning, though I couldn't hep but think that there were slightly too many. I was surprised not to hear a voice at some point saying 'This Film was brought to you by the New Zealand Tourist Board.'

There's a thought. Apparently the armies in the film are played by New Zealand soldiers, who clearly doublejob, like the Irish army, in Hollywood epics. That means that Saruman's genetically modified army of super-orcs, the Uruk Hai, basically formed in a huge cloning centre in Isengard as shown in the first film, are all New Zealanders. I wonder are they Maori? I'm just thinking that because as Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones revealed, the Imperial Stormtroopers are in fact a giant army of Maoris cloned on some strange waterworld.

Why do Maoris play evil armies?

And why don't they do the Haka before going into battle?