A decent film, but nothing great.

Rating: 1/10 (26 December 2002)

I went to this movie with an open mind, expecting to see something great, yet throughout the whole movie I was bored and uninterested. I've read Tolkien's books two times and greatly love them, but "The Two Towers" does not capture the beauty and sadness that is within the books. One does not want to leave the world of Middle Earth when reading the books yet I greatly appreciated seeing the ending of the movie.
Peter Jackson's directing was very annoying and redundant. He sets up his 180's with no sense of space, at times completely breaking the over the shoulder shots between two characters causing the breakup in the space to occur when it should not. There were too many close-ups when there should have been medium shots and too many extreme long shots when there should have been only long shots. Landscape scenes were often framed with no characters or tiny specks of characters, it should have been filmed as many of the classic westerns were filmed, capturing landscape and characters within the same frame where we could at least feel as if we're there with them and a part of their adventure.
Jackson does not create feeling through images in "The Two Towers," he relies more on dialogue to tell the audience what is happening. The scenes with Frodo, Sam, and Gollum I would have enjoyed better had they been shown with more images and facial expressions from the actors. You can't rely on words to describe the terrible power of the ring, it has to be displayed with images. "The Fellowship of the Ring" comes close to doing this.
The screenplay should have had a major rewrite staying truer to the book with more natural dialogue. Many of the lines would be spoken and fall flat. There was no projection or passion in the lines, they were too stilted. Joking in the middle of a battle should have been crossed out by the director, and the entire love story should have been deleted. Doing this would have left room for the many scenes that were left out from the book. The ending of this movie lacks in drama and suspense, I deeply wanted to feel drawn into it and expect the next and last adventure, but the only thing I wanted was to get out of the room.
What I greatly saw spelled over the entire movie was "TIRED." The actors were tired and the director was tired, and this was just another movie to crank out. With every scene saying "OK, that's done. Let's move on," with no care or artistic appreciation of the true art of filmmaking. I don't expect much from "The Return of the King" next year and I don't expect much from Peter Jackson as he's too soft of a director to show the true grittiness of Middle Earth. He is targetting this movie more towards females and those who haven't read the books and not true Tolkien fans like myself.

Overall it was a decent action film, with your typical fight choreography, one liners, Legolas and his unlimited arrows, and the good guys always coming out unscathed. "The Fellowship of the Ring" was excellent and this movie should have stayed more along the lines of that, with some improvements. On a scale of one to ten I give it a seven, because it wasn't all that bad and it wasn't all that good and at least they tried.

7/10