Almost Perfect.

Rating: 10/10 (1 April 2003)

Everything that can be said about Peter Jackson's Two Towers by now has been said, and I'm not one for repeating the same well-earned praise. Suffice it to say that the movie delivers entirely on the expectation levels set by the first part of the trilogy, the set pieces are spectacular on a biblical scale, the cinematography is flawless and the scenery just awesomely epic. Jackson as everyone knows filmed all three parts together, which was a very bold move, but it's clear (as if it wasn't before) that both the audience and the studio's financial investments are in good hands.
The Two Towers is a much darker film than the Fellowship Of The Ring, and this is deliberate, matching the growing sense of dramatic pressure and impending doom in the books. Lighting, cinematography and musical score all merge seamlessly to evoke this atmosphere, and all traces of the "cutesey" have vanished. Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn comes to the fore, expanding the fierce nobility of his role with consummate skill. Ian McKellern continues to make the part of Gandalf his very own, Elijah Wood reprises his role as Frodo with the same accomplishment, and best yet, the remaining three hobbits are all fleshed out far better, given more on-screen time and thus made more three-dimensional and credible. Christopher Lee remains a superbly-cast Saruman, and the newcomers Brad Dourif as the venomously evil Grima Wormtongue and Bernard Hill as Theoden are both excellent.
I have to mention how brilliantly Gollum as a character has been handled. The CGI is flawless, and Andy Serkis' realisation of the role show a scope of perceptivity and imagination that is literally jaw-dropping. The usage CGI as a whole in the movie has been executed superbly, both in terms of character and set pieces (the attack of the warg-mounted Uruk-hai, the battle of Helm's Deep etc) and I was especially interested to see how Jackson would handle the Ents, which I suspected would be the most difficult thing to do without breaking the suspension of disbelief. Needless to say, he gets away with it.
A number of rabid Tolkien purists on this message board have carped about a number of chapters having been "cut" from the end of the original book - well, I'm sorry, but I just don't see the issue. The Fellowship "stole" briefly from the start of The Two Towers with the death of Boromir, because it was a more natural end-point, and The Two Towers ends with Frodo and Sam's passage to Cirith Ungol. What happens next won't be cut (and it's only two chapters) - it'll be in at the start of the next movie. You have to remember that this isn't a weekly serial - we have to wait a year for the final part - so ending The Two Towers on the same unbearable cliffhanger as the original book would not be the move of a smart director. Plus of course, the final book, The Return Of The King is much shorter. It doesn't look it on the shelf, but it's half-full of appendices and background historical information which won't be relevant to the final movie, so Jackson will have been happy to have moved the final episode into the last movie. Admittedly I don't see any real reason why Jackson should have had Faramir take Frodo and Sam to Osgiliath for another albeit small set-piece (this does not occur in the book - they part company before this point), but apart from pointlessness, I have no issues with this. Maybe Jackson thought that the Ring's growing hold on Frodo needed restressing from a dramatic point of view. I'll go with his judgement on this. The same thing with the arrival of Haldor and the Elves at Helm's Deep. Not in the book, but not an issue. Maybe Jackson felt he needed to point out that the forces of Good in Middle Earth were stretched to breaking and that there no huge reserves waiting in the background.
So after all this praise, why "almost perfect"? I feel almost guilty to carp after such praise but there were a few little niggles that unsettled me.

Firstly, the character of Faramir. There's nothing wrong with David Wenham's acting, but the character has been radically changed. Faramir is meant to be a gentler wiser version of Boromir, not prone to unthinking rashness, but labouring under the fact that his father holds him in no value, compared to his bold foolhardy dead brother. The movie version of Faramir is far less grandiose.
Then there's Eomer's Rohirrim. Where are they all? There's meant to be 2,000 of them running around, but the bunch we're shown looks like a small mounted version of some Hell's Angel chapter. Not very impressive.
I'm still not happy with the way Gimli is portrayed. Yes in the books there is some comic relief provided in the banter between Gimli and Legolas, but Jackson still uses the character as not much more than a comedy dwarf. It's stereotypical and shallow - Gimli either fights or argues. There's no sense of the majesty of the dwarves, just as in movie #1 there was no evocation of Gimli's sense of loss at the fall of Moria, the culminating achievement of his people. Plus WHY OH WHY did they use John Rhys-Davies to voice Treebeard as well? It can't have been a matter of budget, and it's very obviously the same actor being used.
Finally, and this I found shocking in how much it clanged, how much a single 5 second sequence totally destroyed the grandeur and the sense of the epic, how completely it shattered my sense of disbelief - Legolas, the snow-boarding elf on the shield. I cannot believe that a director with the perception and the subtlety of touch that Jackson has demonstrated ever even filmed this scene, let alone left it in the final cut. Why oh why is it there? It's self-indulgent, utterly unnecessary, completely out of place and destroys atmosphere at a single stroke. Yes I know Orlando Bloom is an extreme sports fan, but why is it necessary to leverage this and include this scene? It's a mark of how well the rest of the movie has been executed that it survives this piece of trite ludicrousness. I think Jackson really lost the plot with this incident, and it's made to stand out even more because the rest of the movie fits together so seamlessly. Peter, you're not good with comic touches, and they're not needed, so please PLEASE stop thinking you need to hammer them in.
However, despite these niggles, the movie is a triumph. Roll on December 18th and The Return Of The King. A worthy 9 out of 10.