Here's my least favorite question: "Well, did you read the books?"

Rating: Null/10 (26 January 2003)

Yes, yes, Peter Jackson's second installment in this troll-filled trilogy is epic, it's huge, it's masterful, it's scary at times, it's an incredible blend of special effects and New Zealand landscapes, it's better than all the new Star Wars movies put together. It also contains, however, one of the most boring hours in recent cinema history: the epic-yet-deeply-personal-for-five-or-six-characters battle preparations sequence. Warning: no one will be admitted during any of the very important `So it has come to this war!' speeches delivered by somebodyorother. In this long, long, thudding hour, scenes are repeated, dialogue is switched around and re-spoken, and actors dressed as elves clearly expect to be taken seriously.
So, okay, fine, the whole movie's long. I've gotta get over that, right? But when I to, I found that it didn't make a lot of sense to me. Here are a few of my questions:

If Gandalf is really that powerful, why can't he do more?

Where the hell did Gandalf go for most of the movie and how did he show up with thousands of soldiers at the end?

What was all that stuff with Frodo being kidnapped and taken to some city under siege?

If Helm's Deep is such a great place to go when under attack by Orks, why does it look more like everybody's backed themselves into a corner?

If those black riders are really that scary, why is it so easy to hide from them?

If the whole schtick of the tree characters is that they take their sweet time making decisions, how come they make the sudden decision to go to war when they see their forest has been wrecked?

Why were there nine black riders on horseback in the first movie but now there's only one of them, and he's riding a dragon?

What were the Two Towers? I guess they were the volcano and the other thing, or maybe the other thing and the totem pole they put Gandalf on in the first movie, but until the last moments of this movie, I never saw them together, and didn't really understand what would be so bad about just letting Christopher Lee build his damn towers.

When I ask people these questions, their response is inevitably, `Well, did you read the books?' Hell, yes, I read the books and forgot them years ago, and don't change the subject. Nobody should need a bibliography to watch these movies.
I admit this much: the computer-generated Golem character is great. Undeniably great, so great that you forget he's computer-generated, so great you want him to be the main character, so great that it's worth the price of admission just to see him, so great that all the scenes he's in become the best scenes in the movie.
So, yes, it's better than the new Star Wars movies, and George Lucas should be very jealous of Peter Jackson. But at least the first couple of Star Wars movies had some genuine laughs in them, and didn't make you sit there for three and a half hours.
Knowing when to let your audience leave the theater is a big part of being a genius.