Even worse than the first film

Rating: 1/10 (27 February 2015)

The Riders of Rohan recover the body of the king's dead son and we spend fifteen minutes watching characters we don't care about bemoan the death of a character whose death we never witnessed. Then we watch Sam and Frodo have the same conversation over and over and over again: 'Oh, Sam, I can't go on.' 'It's the ring, Mr Frodo, I know!' Oh, and now they have this creepy character called Gollum that follows them around and is supposed to be entertaining, but comes across as irritating. For some reason Sam still calls Frodo 'Mr'. Oh, then some boring talking trees show up and bore to death even the characters themselves. What chance does the audience stand? Finally we get to the climax and the grand battle. Except Jackson doesn't know how to direct it. The tone wavers. It goes between terror (women and children expecting to be slaughtered) to comedy with Gimli and Legolas. And then he keeps interrupting the battle in order to cut to those boring bits with the talking trees. He even adds slow motion in the battle scenes for no good reason. The end result is that there is no rhythm to the battle and the emotion is dissipated. There you have it. Lots of noise and CGI, and no emotion - apart from boredom.