The Best Imaginable Second Chapter

Rating: 10/10 (31 December 2004)

For this movie, Peter Jackson was faced with a challenge: how to make a great stand-alone film when the beginning and ending are in separate movies? He did a magnificent job. Like the first one, this movie starts with a slam-bang battle; however, where the first film had armies, this film has a clash between two titans.
From there, the movie builds to the enormous set-piece siege. And, along the way, we meet one of the most interesting characters of this, or any movie: Gollum, the complex, torn, schitzophrenic slave to the will of the One Ring.
And, even more than the first film, the Ring is also a character: the viewer can see it wearing down Frodo, pushing him to the limit, tempting those around him. The encounter at Osgiliath, while not in the book, is a fascinating visual realization of more subtle themes in the book. I know that, when I walked out of the theatre, I knew that there was only one movie I was looking forward to during the next year, and that was Return of the King.