The Two Towers is VERY Over-Rated

Rating: 1/10 (19 December 2002)

Good reviews aside, I sat through an incredibly choppy and badly-paced, eternally long and boring film with no characterization to speak of, one that essentially leaves us at the same place we were at the end of Fellowship of the Ring. No good character interaction, a CGI-Gollum that is blurry when he moves quickly--in fact, all the CGI is pretty hokey--and a final battle at Helm's Deep which, I just don't get it, it's really not all that special. Maybe the Extended Director's Edition will rescue this one the way it did Fellowhip. I hope so, but this film is more like a bad summer movie than it is a sweeping fantasy. The pacing is terrible, characters disappear, the dialogue is a hollow retread of the first first. Aside from one schizophrenic dialogue between Gollum and himself, we could have skipped this whole film. Certainly, the meager story on display here could have been told in two hours. A bore. A jerky mess. A shame.