Helm's Deep: The Making of an Epic Battle Scene Yasser Owino College

The opening of the Helm's Deep battle scene in “The Two Towers” has a lot of similarities with the opening scene from Sergio Leone's “Once Upon A Time in the West”. Both films have classic scores, but both use silence and some spare Foley sound effects to set the stage. Silence is important because a battle, like a shoot out, is all about contrast. Helm's Deep is full of contrast as a thirty-nine-minute sequence. It has to carry the dramatic weight, the ups and downs of a mini-film within a film to hold our attention. In fact, since The Two Towers is essentially the middle of a larger story, filmmaker Peter Jackson and his co writers needed the Helm's deep battle to be climactic enough to provide enough temporary closure that the film could stand on its own. In the end, it's that necessity which generated the best cinematic battle of the trilogy, and one of the best film battles of all time.

The Helm's deep battle or the battle of Hornburg as it's known in the books can be broken down into twenty-four beats. These beats provide a rough layout for the rhythm of the sequence. In terms of contrast, looking at the film in this way the viewer notices that a large part of the battle is virtually monochromatic. The cinematographer,...