Excellent sequel in the definitive fantasy film trilogy

Rating: 7/10 (12 March 2004)

Even after seeing Fellowship, I still haven't read the books but after just seeing Two Towers on the beautiful extended edition DVD I am now motivated to see the end of the trilogy before it ends its theatrical run. The story progresses nicely in this the second chapter which is in my opinion the most difficult of the three to execute. Once again director Jackson impressively conveyed the scope and grandeur of Middle Earth mostly through state of the art computer animation and special effects. Speaking of that, Gollum the CGI character, while a technical marvel, became extremely annoying. That's just my individual opinion. By the way, I think Jar Jar Binks is brilliant comic relief in The Phantom Menace (I'm not prejudiced against CGI characters!) The acting from the cast was also spot on though frankly I don't think the material was that challenging (ie. no one deserved an Oscar nomination). The costumes, props, and beautiful location photography were also uniformly excellent as befits a production of this magnitude. 8/10. I should note that I haven't seen the original theatrical cut of the film so I don't know what else besides background on the Boromir (?) character was added. I look forward to the conclusion of the trilogy!