Hugely epic and well-made, The Two Towers is another success for the Lord of the Rings.

Rating: 10/10 (18 February 2007)

The Two Towers dwarfs The Fellowship of the Ring in size, scale, and the grandeur of the action scenes. While FOTR followed Frodo and co. as they started their journey across Middle Earth to destroy the Ring, TTT is our first glimpse at what happens in the bigger world as the Fellowship breaks - a war is being fought over this Ring, and the war is starting now... Needless to say, TTT is a bigger film than FOTR. Instead of about 100 Orcs and a troll against nine men, we have armies of thousands of Orcs and Uruk-hai, against armies of thousands of Men, and proper big weapons. And the results are amazing. The battle for Helm's Deep is brilliantly done - Braveheart can pack its bags and go home, this is the new champion of sword-fighting epics. The way tension was built up to the battle was brilliant - you found yourself practically drooling by the time the Men were gathered on the outer walls of the castle, ready for battle. And besides from ending with the smaller fights and starting with the larger wars, this film also started off some new plots - the story of King Theoden and Eowyn and the first meeting with Gollum (we got some glimpses of him in the last film but this film is his real introduction) - and develops these plots sufficiently for them to be continued and ended in the next film - the epic close to this great trilogy. This film definitely did not pass on anything, and though the relatively slim budget (believe me, $93,000,000 is not much for a film of this scale) tells you that a lot of it is CG, it is still bloody impressive, and builds more on the LOTR trilogy's status as an epic series. The Fellowship has broken, but the story is still far from over... 10/10