Disappointed and Angry

Rating: 1/10 (19 December 2002)

After the wonderful realization of "The Fellowship of The Ring," I was greatly anticipating the next installment with "The Two Towers." As a writer I can understand that some changes need to be made to adapt a book to a film; however, I think the title given to this movie should have been "Peter Jackson's Two Towers." The plot changes and additional scenes with Arwen were absolutely unnecessary for translating the book to film. These changes simply represented how the director wanted the books to go and the heck with Tolkein.
There was much to like about the movie in terms of art direction and special effects. Unfortunately, so much attention went to creating digital characters (and I'll say that Gollum was nicely done in large part to Andy Serkis' work) that the real actors were left to stand around and watch, or react to what the virtual characters were doing, which was the downfall of "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace." Thankfully Gollum was no Jar Jar Binks, but it still created a similar issue. The relationships between the characters in "Fellowship of the Ring" were beautiful and moving, and now all of a sudden everyone's emotionally disconnected with each other - except for Arwen and Strider, and Arwen never once set foot in the "Two Towers" book! Ugh.
I'm no purist where Tolkein is concerned and I would have been able to live with small changes necessary to make a movie. For example, I can understand why the film didn't end at the same place that the book did and that didn't bother me too much. Nevertheless, there were some very rich scenes in Tolkein's novel (from the growing friendship between Legolas and Gimli, to some very moving moments between Frodo and Sam, one of which awakens the best out of Gollum for a moment) that were ignored and replaced by Mr. Jackson's own ideas. This I cannot live with and makes me very angry. I hope he gets back to Tolkein's world when he finishes the last movie because I don't like Jackson's.