Not perfect, but again solid

Rating: 9/10 (3 December 2004)

This was obviously going to be the more "boring" of the three movies, since it was only a midway step between the beginning and the end of the quest. It was therefore good of Phillipa Boyens and Fran Walsh to give the very significant speech of truth to Sam, who states the purpose of the journey right at the end.
I have not given this movie a 10/10. In my mind, The Two Towers was a better movie than the first one, although further away from the Tolkienian idea of it, but it lacked a general "something", thus it did not deserve top marks. What I did notice in this movie was a general improvement in the actors. Even Orlando Bloom and Elijah Wood - from various reasons unconvincing in the first movie from my point of view, put up a much better performance and a much more credible one. The "sliding down the stairs of Helm's deep on a shield" scene that Orlando had was still unconvincing and funny in a moment which should have been everything but that, but generally he did better.
The Uruk Hai were probably one of the highlights of the movie in my opinion and obviously throwing Aragorn off the cliff was a good move for those people who have not yet read Tolkien - like for instance my brother. With two characters resurrected from the Dead - Gandalf and Aragorn and the clever alternative pictures of Eowyn and Arwen in Aragorn's mind, the plot already gains significantly.
Again, from the point of view of the special effects - they were good because they did not show as special effects - even Gollum was very realistic! To answer the critics who believe that these CGI techniques should have been replaced by models - well, Peter Jackson did try to make everything that he could real life and scale model, but some things are simply undoable!
I generally do not enjoy very much the Frodo-Sam-Gollum scenes because, while Sean Astin probably played his best there, Elijah Wood is still incomplete from my point of view. Faramir, although he was a disappointment for me as a person who read the books, is made more realistic, which fits the general description of the movies. I do understand why Mr. Jackson wanted this fate in store for him, but I still want to see Faramir as a younger and less important copy of Aragorn - a Numenorian.
Since I judge this from the perspective of movie making, I will give it a 9/10 for the small defficiencies it had. Viggo Mortensen, Ian McKellen and Sean Astin however deserve 10s for their own performances.