play that emboldening theme song one more time...

Rating: 4/10 (22 December 2002)

Perhaps it was the fate of the 'middle film' in the series, but Two Towers suffers from excessive plot and excessive pulls to the heart-strings to match. It seemed that every character with at least a five minute span of character development eventually got their own democratic turn at dramatic lighting and sappy music with us all supposedly marveling at their remarkable valor as they marched into their next challenge. After about three or four turns at that and about an hour and a half into the movie, I began wondering when the intermission was going to be. The problem was, given very little time to get to know these characters, we began to wonder why we should care about their valiant acts or their noble deaths.
I'm not sure that I can forgive the almost predictable, certainly tiresome, and problematically vapid bravado of the film to simply an excess of things going on. The beauty of the film and the worthwhile performances of the cast might have induced me to forgive the relative lack of depth or magic in this rendering, had I not felt that I was being clumsily and unsuccessfully manipulated at every turn.
I very much enjoyed Fellowship due to a skill I saw in distilling Tolkien's complex world into a meaningful exploration of character difference and temptation, as regarded each character's current and historical relationship to the ring of power. This film continues to do so in the sequences that are perhaps the most rewarding, those involving the trio of Frodo, Sam, and Gollum, a bizarre relationship but psychologically riveting. We understand the complexity of the task of Frodo through both his own tortured visage and the reactions of those around him. Conversely, the minute long introduction sequence between Aragorn and his new would be human love interest is hardly enough to inspire us to any level of emotional involvement, yet somehow we are supposed to believe that this two sentence exchange should be enough to carry the sub-plot through the rest of the film. There is simply far too much that happens in this film for us to even understand the depth of what is going on, and there are far too many times when we are left with the feeling that at this moment we are expected to be moved to tears. Whiplash is probably a better description for the reaction.
Despite my disappointment in the Two Towers, I still do look forward to the final film. This film never relents in its lively and magnetic exposition of a rich other world. Despite its inability to rouse me to any heights of passion in the battle of good versus evil, I am left still anxious to watch 'what happens next'.