A Smiling Lucas

Rating: 5/10 (19 December 2002)

`The Two Towers' is by far my favorite of the Tolkien books. Perhaps that's why I left the theater disappointed that Peter Jackson felt it necessary to remove so much of what made the book special, and replace those things with his own unnecessary scenes. I've read a few comments that defend Jackson by saying there just wasn't enough time to represent the book accurately. Well, perhaps he could have found more space if he hadn't spent half the movie showing characters on horseback riding around in long panoramic shots that slowed the pace of the movie. They rode in, and they rode out. They rode in, and they rode out. They rode in, and they rode out. They rode in, and they rode out. See, isn't that annoying? I mean, I started checking my watch after about a half dozen of these. What on earth happened? Where's the storyof the Ents? Where's the confrontation of Gandolf and Saruman? Where's the spider? Where's the sense of evil that was present in the book? Why did those hobbits spend most of their time on top of Treebeard composited with a really bad chromakey? Why did he have to show women and children in the caves repeatedly?
About the only thing in this movie that to me had of the depth of Tolkien's work was the character of Gollum. He was brilliantly depicted, and a marvel of 3D animation, but he doesn't save the movie for me.
I saw `The Fellowship' twice in theaters, and bought both the regular and extended versions of the DVD, but I'd be surprised if I'll see this movie again!
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