"The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers"

Jackson must have sensed that. He ends the Merry and Pippin thread with some of the movie's most extraordinary images, of Treebeard and the Ents convening in an open glade before setting out to do battle. (And the battle scene featuring the Ents is sheer magic. There's a shot of an Ent ducking his flaming branches in the spume of a rushing flood that happens so quickly you register it on the rebound -- it's like a doodle on your subconscious.)

And the sequence isn't an isolated bit of magic. The glittering images Jackson puts on-screen are an embarrassment of riches. Like the sight of the years literally dropping from Théoden's visage as the curse on him is lifted. Or a flashback to Gandalf's battle with the Balrog, a huge, dragonlike creature. Or the warrior Orcs, as terrifying as they were in the last movie, with their skin looking as if oil-smeared leather had been dragged over their bones (you imagine the foul stench they give off whenever the Orcs are on-screen).

Then there is the battle of Helm's Deep, about which it is not too much to say that Jackson risks comparison with the great battle sequences of Akira Kurosawa and D.W. Griffith. (The sight of the massed Orc armies arrayed for battle recalls the epic precision of the troops arranged for battle in Stanley Kubrick's "Spartacus.") The sheer scale of this battle scenes doesn't lend itself to the horrible intimacy of the hand-to-hand combat in "The Fellowship of the Ring." Those scenes, in which we were conscious of the physical exertion of the warriors, of their being smeared with earth and sweat, called up Orson Welles' staging of the Battle of Shrewsbury in his "Chimes at Midnight" (for my money, the greatest battle sequence ever put on film). The combat in that film anchored the fantasy to a recognizable physical reality. It gave some weight and tragic resonance to the film.

In "The Two Towers," the battle of Helm's Deep seems to take place in some vision of hell dredged up from our collective imaginations. Théoden and the armies of Rohan, assisted by Aragorn and Legolas and Gimli, are besieged in their fort by 10,000 Orc fighters in the midst of a pitch-black rainy night. At the beginning of the scene you can't imagine that that sky will ever clear, and it seems to be the dread and blood lust seeping out of the skins of the combatants that have turned it black. The sheer size of the sequence is awe-inspiring (particularly the sight of the Orcs' raised spears, which appear to go on for miles). But it's not just the size that's impressive here. Jackson has staged and shot the scene with a masterly clarity, the sort that most contemporary action directors can't seem to manage in a simple shootout. It's not just that Jackson is succeeding on an epic scale here, it's that he's working on a scale most directors wouldn't dare.

The battle of Helm's Deep is the strongest evidence of what is so startling about Peter Jackson as a filmmaker. Unlike almost any other director I can think of who dares to work on an epic scale, Jackson doesn't seem to have a whiff of megalomania to him. There may be simple reasons for that. The fact that the relative economy of his budget (and when the average action movie costs nearly $100 million, $270 million for three three-hour movies is bupkiss) compelled him to keep focused. But I think something else is at work, not only Jackson's sense of duty to the legions of Tolkien admirers but his own love for the material. It may even be that the story of heroes who have put themselves at the service of a cause has inspired him to put himself at the service of the material.

The film has the feeling of teamwork, as if Jackson were engaging his production crew and cast in his own grand quest. If humility is possible in epic filmmaking, Peter Jackson possesses it. Time and again in "The Two Towers" the camera swoops over the mountains and valleys of Middle Earth and you think that this must be what it's like to see with God's eyes. Luckily, Peter Jackson hasn't forgotten that he's a human being.

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