no no no

Rating: 5/10 (5 January 2003)

"The Two Towers" is a mediocre action film. there, i said. go burn my effigy.
the people who are giving this 10 are the equivalent of the Star Wars fanboys who will try and convince you "...Phantom Menace" was a good film. it wss not a good film and neither is this.
the pacing for this film was awful, for the first half i was wishing for a remote control to skip to something intresting. the re-introdution of Gandalf was moronicly done (was ANYONE fooled by the whole Gandalf/Saruman thing?), Theoden was laughable, the whole Aragorn falling over a cliff stank of trying to eat up running time (in a three hour film! why did they need to eat up running time in a three hour film??) and the Aragorn-Arwen sub-plot was slow and pointless.
the problems continue, Gollum had his moments but they were few, and the annoyance factor of him otherwise was just not worth it. Sam is just as annoying as he is in the book. not a good thing. Frodo is a wuss, even more so the Theoden. the fact that the three most irritating charcters in the whole film share nearly all thier scenes together doesn't help. i was hoping the orcs would catch them.
Liv Tyler is an awful actress. i don't know why she delivers all her lines in that stupid goddamn voice but i wish Jackson had told her to knock it off. it dosen't help that she's given awful dialoge in a pointless sub-plot either.
some of the CGI was good, but the Wargs were crap. and what were the Nazgul riding? they looked like aborted dragon fetuses.
300 guys against 10,000 orcs? maybe they should have got Steven Segal to play Aragorn instead. and in the best action film tradition, the Orcs are treated as cannon fodder, thus destroying any credable threat they represent. nursery school infants could take down an army or Orcs in this film.
the constant onslaught of short jokes did not help. i'm convinced Jackson has something against short people, look at how he's pushed Merry and Pippin as far away from the story as he could. i'm convinced he would have written them out entirely if he thought he'd get away with it.
Faramirs change didn't serve any purpose. i suspect Peter Jackson was just running out of ways to make Frodos journey intresting (theres only so many shots of Frodo, Sam and Gollum walking and occasionly looking over things that you can put in one film) so used Faramir to liven it up. at least it's more worthwhile then the time-wasting romantic sub-plot.
i suppose i should mention things i liked; Gimli was cool, even with Jacksons best attempts to undermine him. the Elves coming to Helms-Deep. the occasional good moments with Gollum. most of the cast turned in pretty good performances (with the notable exception of Liv Tyler)
hey i didn't like it but you should probably go see it anyway. just don't expect anything more then a bog-standard action film.