Slightly disappointing, but the best film of 2002 anyway

Rating: 8/10 (27 December 2002)

Maybe my expectations were too high. Maybe all the critics' hype of the film set me up. But while "The Two Towers" is head and shoulders above everything else this year (including Spielberg's awful "Catch Me If You Can" and Scorcese's flawed masterpiece "Gangs of New York"), it's not a perfect film by any means.
Perhaps the greatest flaw in the movie is the failure to maintain narrative speed. The film does a truly admirable job of picking up the story "where we left off." The superb special effects of Gandalf's battle with the Balrog are eye-popping. But from there, the film stumbles a bit. The Fellowship's chase of the Uruk-Hai across the plains of Rohan lacks much of the spectacle and blow-you-away visuals that were typical of the first film. The introduction of Eothain's horsemen seems sudden and jarring. The special effects of Theoden's transformation from ensorcelled king into hale-and-hearty middle-aged man are too shocking to be believed. The scenes with Merry, Pippin and the Ents in the forest are cut into the film almost as afterthoughts, and are not well-integrated, not well-written and not lengthy enough to really stand up well. The animation of Treebeard himself is rather poor, and looks more like a sad version of a Disney animatronic creature than the astounding, realistic being we have come to expect from Weta Film. And the middle-of-the-film segments with Elrond, Arwen and Aragorn are poorly paced, poorly conceived and don't fit in well with the rest of the story (or what is to come in the next film, either).
But most disturbingly, the script too often takes the audience out of the real of Middle Earth and back into the present. The villian here are the silly jokes that appear throughout the film. Gimli's "oof"-ing moments when the Isengard wolves fall on him is something out of Chaplin, not Middle Earth. The brief, joking exchange between Aragorn and Gimli as they attempt to sneak out of Helm's Deep and attack the Uruk-Hai on the ramp are similarly out of place (they would have fit in had the scene been better-written). Indeed, the film turns Gimli from a full-blown, honest, realistic character into the "joking little dwarf" character of the film. It's something to be expected of lesser films like "Willow" or TV shows like "Hercules" -- not LOTR.
But overall, the film is outstanding. While the pacing of the narrative leaves something to be desired, the overall story is terrific (a major accomplishment, given the huge amount of source material). The character development is much stronger in this film than in the first one, and the acting -- particularly by Christopher Lee, Brad Dourif, Ian McKellan, Bernard Hill and David Wenham -- is quite good. The battle for Helm's Deep ranks with the opening segment of "Saving Private Ryan" and the snow-battle of "The Empire Strikes Back" as one of the great war scenes of all time. So is the battle of the Ents at Isengard (although one wishes there had been more of this segment).