Darkness on Middle Earth

Like a mighty glacier on the move, a tripartite enterprise of such epic yearnings as Lord of the Rings needs time and patience for its impact to register. First time round, I was a sceptic. Such protracted introductions, so many characters, and what unpronounceable names .... I was not a happy fan
of JRR Tolkien. But after a year's intermission, I emerged a convert from Part Two - shattered, shaken, stirred, even worshipful. It has a grandeur that it's not hyperbole to call Miltonic.

Moreover, though it's no incitement to cinema-going, the film has collected a fearful dread from the way the world has gone since 9/11. Peter Jackson's film, unplanned though it was, now looks like a prophetic allegory for Osama bin Laden's messianic threats to world order as well as the besieged resistance of the great and the small. Even the sub-title The Two Towers involuntarily recalls the Twin Towers.

Lines like "A new power is coming, its victory is at hand" or "There will be no dawn for men" or "War is upon us" have gained the resonance of fundamentalism that overlays cinematic fantasy.

Fortunately, if the world is spared, it's the fantasy that will prevail. What an eyeful it is. This is probably the greatest battlepiece composed for the screen since Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible. Computergenerated imagery now adds its own genetic wonders to the elves, giants, humans and multispecies combatants.

Tusked mastodons lumber over the field of battle with howdahs like minarets on their backs housing the avant-garde troops. A winged pterodactyl with a sinister cowled rider in the saddle flaps over the ramparts like a malevolent spotter aircraft. Wild boars as big and fierce as rampaging tigers attack the horse artillery. A huge dam splits asunder in a flood that makes Cecil B DeMille's famous parting of the Red Sea look like a piddling trickle.

And then there's the final battle of Helm's Deep, the fortified keep of the King of Rohan that Saruman, the wicked wizard, puts to the siege ... Gustave Dore's great engravings of Paradise Lost look as if they've been given the gift of life as huge armies clash by night.

You can believe that there are 10,000 men on screen at once. All manner of munitions, from land harpoons to scaling ladders 50-foot high and hung with invaders, reduce the implacable walls to rubble.

New lands, new civilisations, new characters keep the fanciful parameters of Tolkien's world continually expanding into that private universe that constitutes the multi-part work's appeal. Probably, like me, you'll be groping through the first 20 minutes or so just to discover, or recall, who's who.

Fear not. The story splits into four distinct parts as we follow each group of characters through a wonderland of necromancy where Graeco-Roman, Gothic, Pre-Raphaelite and Hollywood Medieval styles of culture and habitat all coexist with a bestiary of monsters and a pantheon of gods.

Hobbits Frodo and Sam (Elijah Wood, Sean Astin) push overland to destroy the baleful Ring that has cursed the world, and, en route, finally ensnare the skinny, near-naked Gollum that's been stalking them.