Bitterly disappointed

Rating: Null/10 (19 December 2002)

After a year of intense anticipation after the first, excellent installment of LOTR, I was bitterly disappointed.
Spoilers follow.
The film deviated drastically from the story line of the book, and although I fully understand that it can't (and probably shouldn't) stick right to the book, the way they deviated violated the spirit of the story in a big way. The changes made in "Fellowship", although substantial, were by comparison quite natural ones that did not at all violate the intent of the tale. Here, whole sections are inserted that did not appear in the story at all,and the motivations and actions of crucial, central characters are fundamentally altered. I spent at least a third of the movie just shaking my head in disbelief. Time was wasted on inserted material to the extent that the third film will have no chance of covering all the crucial events it should contain, especially the Scouring of the Shire-- there is no way there will be time to include that, and I predict that the last film will end simply with the destruction of the Ring.
The biggest problems for me with Two Towers were as follows.
1) Faramir not showing the nobility he did in the book. Instead, he lusts for the ring as did Boromir, and TAKES FRODO TO OSGILIATH for pete's sake. This entirely made-up section wasted time they should have spent showing Frodo, Sam, and Gollum heading up Morgul Vale and into the Cleft of Cirith Ungol for the showdown with Shelob and Frodo's eventual capture by the orcs of Mordor. The cliffhanger ending should have been when Sam collapses against the door to the orc-tunnel (CLANG!), or at the very least with Frodo appearing to be dead, wrapped in the shrouds of Shelob. With respect to Faramir, a major theme of LOTR was the ability of Men like Faramir to do the right thing simply because it was the right thing to do (i.e. aid Frodo and let him continue his journey), and that a warrior can be accomplished in arms while still being thoughtful, kind, and well-read.
2) The Ents' deciding at first to take no action against Saruman until Merry and Pippin trick Treebeard into walking into a section of destroyed forest. The real story was that the news the two hobbits brought to Fangorn roused the Ents to cold-eyed fury and set them into motion as an implacable foe. For Treebeard to suddenly change his mind upon seeing the burned out forest flies in the face of the most important facet of what makes Ents who they are: Not being hasty.
3) The long, misty-eyed flashbacks with Arwen. I realize this material is more or less contained in the Appendices to LOTR, but to include those sequences in Two Towers wasted screen time that should have been spent advancing the story. These sequences seem to have no purpose other than to put female faces on the screen. Yes, Tolkien's work was male-dominated-- get over it. I would cheerfully spend hours watching Liv Tyler emote onscreen, but this was not the place for it.
4) Miscellaneous: Aragorn falls over a cliff and floats down a river for a couple days while everyone thinks he's dead. The Ents do not send the Huorns to Helm's Deep. Gandalf returns with Eomer's company instead of leading Erkenbrand's people, eliminating the friendship between Aragorn and Eomer; and wasn't Gandalf *inside* the Keep during that battle?
Bottom line is that all this time spent on the inserted material and on the faulty depictions of crucial characters ensured they could not reach the point in the story at which Two Towers actually ends, despite having had a head start by including The Passing of Boromir at the end of Fellowship. No Cirith Ungol, no entry into Mordor, no expulsion of Saruman from the Order by Gandalf breaking his staff. This guarantees that there is no way they'll have time to present the Scouring of the Shire in Return of the King, which is in my view *the* central tenet of the story: The hobbits returning home to set their own community to rights after having matured and grown via their experiences in the War of the Ring. I do not see how the series can recover from the terrible choices made in this film.
Now for the positive. What *was* there was spectacularly well done. The acting is just as good as the first film, and the execution of the sweep of the events was outstanding. Those elements that did stay close to the real story were very nearly flawless, which makes the deviations summarized above particularly anguishing. The real story would have been no more challenging cinematically than what was in the film (Helm's Deep alone was a monumental filmic undertaking), and there is absolutely no doubt that Jackson and Co. would have made it every bit as stunning as they did the 2/3 of the film that stayed on-topic.
For those who are not devoted fans like myself, it stands as a fine film. If they had just not gone so far from the story line it would have been a masterpiece. As it is, these wholesale changes are so egregious that I don't even think I want to see it again, unlike Fellowship which I have viewed half a dozen times now.