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"The Treason of Isengard"
2021
"Gandalf the Grey caught like a fly in a spider's treacherous web!"
-"The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring", by J.R.R. Tolkien
"The Two Towers"
2022
A strong place and wonderful was Isengard, and long it had been beautiful... But Saruman had slowly shaped it to his shifting purposes, and made it better, as he thought, being deceived–for all those arts and subtle devises for which he forsook his former wisdom, and which fondly he imagined were his own, came but from Mordor; so that what he made was naught, only a little copy, a child’s model or a slave’s flattery, of that vast fortress, armoury, prison, furnace of great power, Barad-dûr, the Dark Tower, which suffered no rival, and laughed at flattery, biding its time, secure in its pride and its immeasurable strength.
-"The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers", by J.R.R. Tolkien
2022 was the 20th anniversary of The Two Towers.
Though the whole trilogy are collectively my favorite films of all time, the second installment is definitely my least favorite of the three, ironically in part for the same reason a lot of people love it: Helm's Deep. I find the battle is unnecessarily overblown, in importance, length, and stakes in comparison to the book, to the point that it takes away from other important story points, and somewhat diminishes the impact of the later Siege of Gondor and Battle of Pelennor Fields, which is a much bigger and much more narratively significant battle in the War of the Ring. Nevertheless, it was fun to revisit some of my favorite scenes from the film, as I did in 2021 with Fellowship of the Ring.
I’m getting lots of Lord of the Rings vibes.