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10. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers - The Battle for Helm’s Deep

“So much death. What can men do against such reckless hate?”

The magic that Peter Jackson brings to his adaptation of the Tolkein classic, and this 2002 installment in particular, is to take the story as seriously as any war epic. For Jackson, the battle for Helm’s Deep might as well be the storming of the beach at Normandy, and the payoff is one of the most intense battle sequences in fantasy film history.

The technology here allows this to be an unprecedented battle scene. Even in the days of Cecil B. DeMille you could only muster crowds in the hundreds or maybe thousands. Here, with CG, you can get tens of thousands fighting at once. Of course, that number could go on forever and produce diminishing returns, but Jackson offers us a variety of images so that we don’t miss the trees for the forest.

Part of the technique Jackson employs is to use handheld cameras to put us in the shit. Nothing new there, except that handheld and fantasy almost never go together. Here it ups the brutality beyond that of the many other battle sequences the series has to offer. It also balances the epic, sweeping shots that (very wisely) remind you of the geography of the battle.

Speaking of geography, Jackson makes a conscious effort to remind us where each of our heroes are and what they’re doing during the battle, a deliberate rule set during editing with the foreknowledge that watching a bunch of extras fight, no matter how cool the moves, wouldn’t hold our interest for long.

Jackson contrasts the action of his warriors with the inaction of the Ents, where the talking trees come off like the U.N., deliberating during the slaughter. He also cuts to the civilians waiting inside the castle, whose faces remind us what’s at stake.

And he’s smart enough to make room in the carnage for absolutely bad-ass maneuvers like Legolas’ shield-surfing.

Not unlike #42, the rising tension comes from the seeming inevitability of our heroes’ defeat. Whatever battlement they’ve established, Saruman’s forces have the numbers or the ingenuity to find a way around it. One of the most impressive of these is the explosives they set to breach the wall. Usually I don’t like seeing the same explosion over and over again from different angles, but this one is just astounding enough to warrant replays.

Though it’s not readily apparent, this sequence owes a debt to Xena and Hercules. Years of those shows filming in New Zealand produced an army of stuntmen already living in the area. These performers were trained by professionals with next-gen fight choreography job titles like Cultural Fighting Styles (Tony Woolf) and Mocap Combat Choreographer (Carrie Thiel). Each group of characters (Orcs, Elves, Rohan Warriors) got their own fightings styles. Each stuntman had to learn each style, since there were not enough stuntmen to have each one learn only one. They then endured the four months it took to shoot this sequence, most of that at night in the rain.

The sophisticated approach to the action in this scene was married to the 70 or so years of experience embodied in swordmaster Bob Anderson, who doubled for Errol Flynn, played Darth Vader when he battled Obi-Wan and choreographed this series. His work in this sequence is part of the reason it holds together so well. He understands a certain fundamental action ethic, saying in one of the 472,095 hours of LOTR DVD extras, “Any sort of swordfight has a story of its own within the main story.”

Three things to look out for: That guy without an eye, really doesn’t have an eye. (Apparently it did wonders for his self-esteem to show it.) One of the soldiers throwing a spear is Peter Jackson. And keep an ear out for a Wilhelm scream.

Part One:

Part Two:

Part Three (with a little overlap):

See also: The rest of the trilogy, all of The Seven Samurai, all of 300.

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