this is why i rarely watch movies when i've read the book

Rating: 6/10 (23 December 2002)

a year ago, i came out of Fellowship desperately wanting more.
this week i came out of Two Towers feeling empty.
there were just too many changes from the books this time. not just omissions (like the trip to bree/tom bombadil in Fellowship) or enhancements of character (Arwen in Fellowship), but complete changes of the story. parts were added that i'm sure jackson thought were necessary, but will only serve to alienate the Tolkien loyalists.

*** spoilers follow ******
i know they wanted to play up the arwen/aragorn romance and maybe even upgrade eowyn's crush on aragorn, but why add the scenes where aragon apparently dies?
elves at helm's deep?
where was the ent council? as if merry & pippen could really trick the ents into battle.
they completely changed the character of faramir and foolishly took frodo, sam & gollum to osgiliath. faramir was to be the counterbalance to boromir, but looked like he was cut from the same cloth (yeah, i know, they're brothers). maybe they're setting something up for Return of the King, but Tolkien did just fine with all that.
would have preferred they cut the new scenes and taken the movie as far as the 2nd book does - including cirith ungol & shelob and gandalf facing saruman at isengard. presumably these will be the beginnings of Return of the King.
i was also expecting a flashback to lorien and the giving of the gifts by galadriel.
********
not that this was a BAD movie or anything. maybe by design it would be the hardest to fall in love with. Fellowship had the advantage of developing most of the main characters. Return will have the advantage of the climax(es). TT was stuck in the middle without either. Jackson further burdened it with the story changes.
i loved gollum (most of the time). i loved the internal debate between slinker and stinker. i liked the humor they added with gimli (except the dwarf tossing reference...it worked in Fellowship but seemed forced in TT). the battle scenes were good. i liked the physical transformation of theoden after grima had been sent away.
i gave the movie a 6 because of the changes they made. maybe not a true rating of the movie itself, but a story this well known must be judged against the book it came from.