Highly flawed, but still very good

Rating: 9/10 (24 December 2002)

HUGE SPOILERS
If I were to list all the problems I had with this film, my review would be 5000 words long. TTT is much faster paced than Fellowship, in fact, it's probably paced too quickly; it starts to feel choppy. This is not helped by the fact that only one of the storylines winds up working all of the time (Gollem being the most consistently well-written character in the film), and that one storyline (the Ents) could probably have done with being stuck off-screen for more of the movie, with some scenes being blended into one. The final battle in Helm's Deep suffers from vast tone problems; the arming of the children during the buildup suggests that PJ is going for helpless dread, but during the fighting Gimli constantly spouts comic relief, and there's a frankly ludicrous bit with an orc that carries the Olympic torch (Orcs having apparently not invented matches or fuses). It doesn't help that whenever the battle really gets going, we always seem to cut away to the Ent storyline.
The script is patchy to say the least - there is a whole subplot involving the "common folk" of Rohan which contains not one single good line (at one point someone says "Where's mummy?"). Theodin gets some inferior character development, but I loved the 'exorcism' scene.
One major story problem is that throughout the film we encounter Sauron's forces only four times (two Nazgul attacks, two columns of troops), with the majority of the fighting being against the forces of Saruman. This means that the weight of the impending doom comes entirely from Saruman. By the end of the film, Saruman has been almost completely defeated, and because Sauron's might simply hasn't had enough screen time (bizarre fact: all the troops Sam and Frodo see seem to be marching AWAY from the goodies) the characters throughout the film are forced to constantly remind us that all is probably lost. This culminates with an extended speech from Sean Astin which unfortunately just winds up being corny - by that stage only in the Sam/Frodo/Gollem storyline are there any enemies immediately threatening the heroes.
I was disappointed to see only an incomplete version of Gandalf's fight with the Balrog - the part we see at the beginning is in all ways absolutely first class, but when it is concluded later it misses a huge section and skips straight to the top of the mountain. It should have been one of the most awesome fight scenes ever filmed. Generally, I thought the film used too much footage direct from FOTR to represent memories and flashbacks - not enough was filmed from different angles to make it fresh, even when the scene itself was great. And did we really need TWO dream sequences involving Arwen?
What is most astonishing about this film is how we get hardly any distance into the story. At the end, Saruman is still in his tower, and Sam and Frodo are yet to set foot in Morgul Vale. Unless Jackson is extremely careful, ROTK risks winding up a bullet-paced mess as he attempts to fit all the remaining story into the film. Nevertheless, this episode is often hugely enjoyable and even exhilarating; especially, any scene with Gollem is wonderful, despite the occasional tendency to make him look 'cute'. It might have a list of problems as long as my arm, but this is still rousing stuff.