The Millennium In Frames: Two Towers and the Greatest On-Screen Battle Ever

The Millennium in Frames is our close-to-chronological look at the most important, influential, popular movies since 2000. Right now, we’re nearing the end of 2002.

It took four months to film the Helm’s Deep battle sequence, the climax of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. That’s one month for every ten minutes of screen time, just about. Without debate, it’s clear the intensity of the process paid off. Helm’s Deep is among the Greatest Movie Battles of All Time. Its scale is off the charts, its emotion is real, and the mechanics grinding inside of it never stick or catch. In fact, the greatness of Helm’s Deep embodies the triumph of the Lord of the Rings movies as a trilogy in the early 00s. The battle’s technical mastery, sweeping spectacle, and balance between myth and realism all double as legacy for the complete Rings series.

The mountainous amount of work that went into making Lord of the Rings still isn’t quite appreciated as it should, somehow. Helm’s Deep, for one, consisted of three months of night shoots plus another full month of day shoots. The rain you see throughout the battle is at times real, often man-made, and the thousands and thousands of people that appear on-camera are almost entirely extras, as opposed to the common computer-generated armies of today. Building the set—it was constructed within a New Zealand quarry—took seven months, and the miniature version of the city was twenty square feet in area and over seven feet tall. The war cries and chants had to be recorded amid literal stadiums of people (cricket fans, in fact), and the final result of this marathonic venture was 20 hours of footage, which editors had to cut down to the finished 40 minutes.

So yeah, whoever writes the oral history of how Helm’s Deep came together is gonna have a story on their hands.

What’s evident in the process of Helm’s Deep is the precision and sophistication of the Lord of the Rings operation, and that work style often went against what most Hollywood movies were doing at the time. When The Matrix came out in 1999 (alas, too early for this essay series), computerized visual effects were thrown into overdrive, and the movies became a digital arms race to see who could throw the most impressive fake something on a screen. Lord of the Rings, under the vision of Peter Jackson, trended toward the opposite approach. They found their spectacle in sheer numbers.

Helm’s Deep wasn’t epic because it was able to capture the biggest visual effect of its time, it was epic because it was able to capture, quite literally, more on screen than almost any movie had even thought about doing before. That concept of practicality and groundedness and craftsmanship is exactly why Lord of the Rings carries its badge of prestige, and this stick-to-what’s-real philosophy plays an even bigger factor in how the Rings movies hold up so well, even over a decade later. There just isn’t a lot here that could age.

And from a script standpoint (or a story standpoint, if you want to feel less film-ish), Helm’s Deep is distinctive in how it uses the climactic battle to drive its character arcs forward. Theoden, King of Rohan, begins the battle a disgraced, cowardly ruler, but when the gates are breached by the Uruk-hai, he rides out with sword aloft, rediscovering the poise and courage he knew before he fell under Saruman’s control. Legolas and Gimli grow their friendship throughout the fighting, with their constant one-upmanship doubling as welcome comic relief. Haldir and the elves of Lothlorien are the battle’s most significant loss, with their death signifying the end of elvish involvement in the so-called “wars of men.” There’s emotion here, of many kinds, and when the battle is over, there’s a gratifying sense of “things are different now.”

For contrast, consider the climactic fight scene of a more recent blockbuster, Captain America: Civil War. This movie had to divide its final fight into two parts—first the airport scene, then the Cap vs. Iron Man scene—likely because the first half didn’t have the kind of narrative consequence the movie needed to finish its story. Civil War is ultimately about the competing ideals of Captain America and Iron Man, and while the airport fight with Giant Man and Spider-Man and all them is certainly fun, it does nothing to bring these two characters toward a place where they have to confront their dueling visions for the Avengers.

Thus, the pivot after that scene toward an Iron Man and Captain America one-on-one, where they’re separated from everyone else, put in an entirely new location, and made to duke it out once and for all. That fight scene, with the wrenching final moments where Cap beats Iron Man’s helmet in with his shield, is full of narrative weight. The two men have to face their differences; they cannot leave on the same level of conflict they start on, and this lines the fight with a Helm’s Deep-degree of world-altering consequence and audience investment. We care about what’s happening because the outcome of this fight will affect the future of the characters. At the airport, there’s no future, just gimmicky superhero tricks, and that’s probably why this climax is split in two to begin with: Some writer was wise enough to see that.

And that might one day be the final word on Helm’s Deep: For all its technical excellence and thematic resonance, blockbuster movies mostly derived their lessons from the former instead of the latter. Giant big-budget movies operate on a “more is better” mission statement—more explosions, more cameos, more costumed heroes—but the more essential half of the Helm’s Deep formula is so often missing from giant action scenes. The goal of most battles now is to impress the audience with robot dinosaurs or collapsing buildings or gratuitous slow-motion (sometimes all in the same GD movie), but those things are ultimately fast-food meals, satisfying in the short-term but wholly unmemorable in the long term.

Helm’s Deep is one of the most impressive sequences ever put in a movie, but its ability to leverage its awe-inspiring war choreography to generate lasting moments of feeling should be its greatest legacy. Lord of the Rings is an irreplaceable, impossible-to-duplicate moviemaking achievement. It’s a marvel of craft, a showcase for endless “how did they do that” wonderings, but it persists in our hearts for the story at its center. Somewhere past the wall of spectacle is a running note of passion and reverence, an affirmation of myth that worms beneath pure sensory splendor and blasts its way into memory.