There isn’t anything to invest in beyond “What cool thing are the superheroes going to do next?”Ĭivil War ’s blueprint is a good litmus test for how giant set pieces have been constructed since Helm’s Deep. War Machine might need physical therapy for a bit and Black Widow might have swapped sides, but with all due respect to ScarJo and Don Cheadle, Civil War is really about Captain America and Iron Man, and this battle doesn’t do anything to move their conflict forward. It’s a neat scene with some cool moments, but amid the fighting, none of the major characters are forced to confront their deepest conflicts, so it feels a bit inconsequential.
It makes you care what happens.įor contrast, consider another movie fight scene that many would point to as “epic:” the airport fight among the Avengers in Captain America: Civil War. When what’s on screen has consequences, it becomes real to the audience, and that lends Helm’s Deep a real sense of emotion and investment.
There are more examples, but the point is that Helm’s Deep made an impact on its participants, and thus had ripple effects in the Two Towers’ story. It’s the culmination of an arc that began nearly three hours of movie ago, and the aftermath of this courageous stand would color Theoden’s character for the rest of the series. Theoden, King of Rohan (the good guys at Helm’s Deep), begins the battle cowering behind the walls of his stronghold, but as the Uruk-hai (the bad guys) breach the gates, he rediscovers his leadership prowess and rides out, sword aloft, to enter the battle himself. As the major players clash on the battlefield, they change. The linchpin of the battle, though, and what makes it such a benchmark in movie history, is how it serves Two Towers beyond just being something cool to look at. Helm’s Deep persists today because its tactics made it effectively un-age-able. The movies hold up well because of that approach, too.
The Lord of the Rings series carries its award-winning prestige because of this old-fashioned approach: Only make with computers what we can’t possibly create in real life. Helm’s Deep didn’t capture the biggest visual effect of its time, but it probably captured more actual stuff than 99 percent of movies had before or since. They found spectacle in sheer numbers rather than digital wizardry. But Rings, under director Peter Jackson, zigged when everyone else zagged. Back in 1999, The Matrix had blown everybody’s minds with its computerized visual effects, and what followed was a sort of digital arms race to see who could put the most realistic-looking-but-actually-fake whatever into their movie.
The precision and sophistication of the Helm’s Deep operation, and the Rings trilogy as a whole, brought an emphasis to practical effects that Hollywood was sort of phasing out. It’s a far cry from what most studios were doing at the time, and bafflingly, it would be a far cry from what studios would do in the future (more on that later). To film a war, the Two Towers crew pretty much created one. When the crew had to record the battle cries of all those real people, they did their audio sessions in stadiums.
Those people are almost all real stand-ins, by the way, a long shot from today’s shortcut computer-generated armies. Much of the rain you see in the movie is natural, and when it’s not, it’s man-made, with thousands of gallons of water being dumped atop the thousands and thousands of on-screen characters. For one, 75 percent of the shooting was done at night, often amid nonsensical weather. It can be argued, even, that Helm’s Deep is actually underrated in its achievement. The battle’s technical mastery, sweeping spectacle and tonal balance double as the legacy for the series itself. Really, the greatness of Helm’s Deep reflects the greatness of the Lord of the Rings trilogy as a whole. Its scale is off the charts, its emotion is legitimate, and the dual mechanics of its showmanship and storytelling never clash. Helm’s Deep is heralded as one of the greatest battles ever put into a movie.