You guys are unbelievable.

Rating: 6/10 (21 December 2002)

I just finished reading about 20 reviews that praised this film to no end. I am astonished. Please, take it back one and all.
Do not get me wrong, I'm not saying this was a terrible film, or even mediocre. It was a good film. Stronger than most films. But it was so pale in comparison to the first one. Fellowship cleverly blended action, epic grandeur, and down to earth emmotion. I felt like I knew the characters of the fellowship. So Pete changed a few elements, it bettered the story. It flowed well. It was paced well. It gave us a chance to care for the characters and at the same time understand the intricacies of the plot of the film. This I was expecting from the Two Towers, and it seems like it was all thrown out the window, which baffles me since this film was shot interspersed with Fellowship.
Towers suffers, in my opinion, from overkill in the postproduction sessions. Whoever was helming this portion lost sight of how to treat an audience. I have not read the book, so I don't care about changes, I care about story structure. Do I understand what is happening, do I get to know the people, do I care for them when they are in peril? This is all a product of pacing which I feel was sorely lopsided in this film. Characters fundamentally changed. Gimli was not comic relief in Fellowship, why now? I wanted to breath more with Eowyn. She seemed like such an amazingly strong character, but we're with her less than two minutes and she's crying and she's a mess and we're suppose to feel sorry for her, and I don't even know who she is. Peter's strength of sticking with people in Fellowship, of just giving them some conversation to let us trust the characters, to let us want to pull for them is lost in Towers. It's cutticy cut all over the place. We never stay with a single shot for more than a few seconds. The scenes with Frodo, Sam and Smeagol are the only ones I felt connected to the characters. I know this was a three hour film, but I think there was entirely to much time spent on setting up fight scenes and special effects. We understand there is a war coming. We can conclude that Helm's Deep is going to get it's booty kicked. We could have had half as much fighting building up to Helm's deep and twice as much character development so that when the fighting happened, we really did care about the outcome and not whether this scene looks as real as the last one.
Another thing. This film had no structure. No beginning, no end. It was just three hours of middle. Now I understand that it's the middle book, but it's still a movie unto itself. Again, I just think whoever was in charge of post work was staring at it for so long, he was unable to objectively see whether or not the film was paced right, whether or not the characters were developing, whether or not character's introductions were faithful to the character's initial performance. I mean, thanks to poor editing, Faramir was a joke.
On a plus note, most of the acting was well done(although I do think editing is responsible for choosing some innappropriate moments of humor in the middle of an intensely dramatic scenes, which undermined any power the scenes may have had). Of course, the 2 hours and 45 minutes of special effects are amazing(but we could have used less), and the music is spectacular-- Kudos to Howard shore for an amazing score, the theme for the people of Rohan is breathtaking with it's keltic fiddles.
So, people, don't empower Pete. Don't let him make the third film with even more special effects and less dialogue. We gotta make sure he's gonna give a spectacular closing chapter. Let the characters become the center piece of the story once more. And it's up to us to tell him that. No more thoughtless praise of all the special effects. Lets crack down. We want a good movie with people we care for. All of us together now.