Huge improvement over the first installment

Rating: 9/10 (5 January 2003)

I found the first installment of this series pretty good, but ultimately sloppy. It was just too repetitive, with the characters doing nothing but travelling forward, stopping sporadically to fight battles against forces of faceless monsters which ridiculously outnumbered them. The second installment, of course, picks up right where the first one ended, although it has broken into three narrative tracks. The cutting between the three makes the first half of the film rather uneven. The plotline of Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas defending the people of Rohan is especially slow, and there isn't enough exposition to explain what the heck is going on. I'm actually glad for that, as I'd rather sit through incomprehensible plot than have to listen to twenty more minutes of explaining who the heck these people are and what the heck is going on. I turned to my friend, a long-time lover of the novels, and asked him and he quickly caught me up. Pippin and Merry, the two Hobbits who were captured by orcs at the end of the first movie, escape and run into a sacred forest and are captured by a giant talking tree called an ent. This plotline is slow, too, but the tree monsters were neat enough to hold my attention.
The third plotline, the one with Frodo and Sam, is by far the most interesting. Gollum, the former owner of the ring, now obsessed with it, attacks them and is captured. He soon becomes their guide when Frodo begins to sympathize with his downfall. Gollum is by far the most interesting character in the film, like Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back. This is the first computer-generated character to work completely. Except for his eyes, I'd accept him as a physical entity. And his story and performance are just so tragic that these parts were nearly overwhelming at times. It's too bad they don't award voice characterizations (and I can't find who did it on imdb). The special effects guys really, truly deserve to win an Oscar for their work here. He was so interesting, I wanted the whole movie to be based from his point of view for a lot of the film.
Fortunately, the other two stories do begin to work after a while. There's a great, kinetic battle scene with some wolves that was apparently not in the novel, which, of course, angers all the nerds. This leads to some material about Liv Tyler's character which was also not in the book. My LOTR nerd friend admitted that these scenes were good, and, in my mind, that was the first real scene that got me to give the slightest care for Aragorn, who seems so important but, to me, seemed so uninteresting in the first movie and a lot of this one. The elf and dwarf also begin to come into their own, although the dwarf is often used solely for comic relief, and it's not especially funny. A lot of the movie focuses around a huge battle fought by these characters. They have armies now, so this battle scene is much less ridiculous than the ones in the first film. It's actually enormously entertaining. Pippin and Merry also become more interesting, although they're never going to be, I fear, as interesting as anyone else. The ents whom they hang around with are really cool, though. The ents' attack on one of the towers (I do have to admit that I didn't even realize there were two myself) makes for a very neat scene.
My biggest complaint is about the same as my biggest complaint about the first film. Why are the villains so boring? The orcs and their kin are just dull, faceless villains. They're fodder for the good guys' armies. They run around and yowl, and that's about it. Why can't there be a few generals or something that have interesting things to say? Christopher Lee, who did make a bit of an impression in the first film, is totally shafted in this one. He does little more than sit in his tower and watch his troops march away. There's also a new villain, an Ozzy Osbourne-looking guy named Wormtongue, who is controlling the king of Rohan with magic. Do you really believe that they would allow a guy named Wormtongue to come into their palace, let alone advise the king?
Despite this film's numerous flaws, I can't think of another film of 2002 that really entertained me more than this one. 8/10.