Gloomier follow up to Fellowship of the Ring

Rating: 6/10 (2 October 2012)

Some people prefer this second part in the Lord of the Rings trilogy to the first. I am not one of those people. Where the first movie's strength was in its exploration of a magical fantasy world, this one is – albeit necessarily – more gloomy. I would guess that it's primarily thought highly of for two main reasons. Firstly, for its epic recreation of the battle for Helm's Deep and secondly for the character Gollum. These are two pretty persuasive reasons to be honest. The battle scene is truly massive in its scale and execution, with a lot of painstaking detail; while the character of Gollum is even more revolutionary in cinematic terms. Andy Serkis famously played the character with motion-capture devices all over his body but Gollum was a fully CGI created creature. It's pretty remarkable, therefore, that this character has so much believability and empathy. It's a testament to both Serkis acting and the artists who created him that this is so.
Other than this, for me, The Two Towers suffers a little from neither being the start nor the end of the story. It doesn't have the variety of tones and locations of the first film, and overall it did get a little tedious at times. But this is in no way meant to be a criticism of Peter Jackson's efforts. This was after all merely a recreation of what was actually in the book; it's just that my sensibilities are not so in line with this one. But it's pretty obvious that this is another loving recreation from Jackson and his team; and, like before, it has a great ensemble of actors to do it justice.