Great on several levels

Rating: 10/10 (29 August 2003)

"The Two Towers" is every bit as engrossing and well-developed as its predecessor, plus I believe its new characters (those not introduced in "Fellowship") are some of the most intriguing ever conceived and put on film. You have Gollum, King Theoden, Eowen, Faramir, Grima, Treebeard and many others. Peter Jackson chose the absolute best actors for his trilogy, I'll give no ground on that point. One might argue about Gollum and Treebeard's categorization as "actors", but I say that whether they're CG or human, someone had to write the script and imagine the expressions. The existing characters are developed even more deeply in TT. Sam's humanity, Frodo's compassion, Aragorn's evolving kingship, Arwen's deep love, Gandalf's new transcendent presence, all add richly to the middle chapter of the trilogy. For epic "sweep", you'll have to go far to match TT. The scenes at Helm's Deep, with all of the defenders bunkered in as the numberless forces of Sauron converge on them, is the very picture of desperation, and Jackson masterfully gives us both breadth and detail. Gollum's split-personality conflicts as "Smeagol/Gollum" are nothing short of perfect, and unlike mainstream movies, we aren't spoonfed the reasoning behind his condition, we just get to puzzle it out for ourselves, like intelligent humans! What a relief. Howard Shore's score is again one I'd buy for myself.
I think that the main criticism of TT on this board is that the movie is dull, or that it relies too heavily on special effects. On the "dullness" comment, I'd say that what's one viewer's "dullness" is another's character development, dialogue, and foreshadowing. It's called "filmmaking", along the lines of Kubrick and the Merchant/Ivory team. On the special effects comments, I'd counter that if special effects add to the plot and don't distract, then I'm perfectly OK with them. Now, I wouldn't be drawn to a film totally comprised of special effects, but TT is nothing like that. It's employment of them is only for the sake of plot and believeability. Would you want some guy playing Gollum, heavily made up, and totally false? No thanks. I bought the general release DVD yesterday, instead of waiting for the extended version, which I will purchase also. I only hope that TT's extended version is as fantastic as Fellowship's turned out to be.