Not nearly as good as first.

Rating: 7/10 (7 April 2003)

This movie was a disappointment for me, I am a huge Tolkien fan and I loved the Fellowship movie, but Two Towers has some big flaws that prevented it from being as good as the first in the trilogy...
1. Very americanized, they put alot of cheesy hollywood gimmicks into it, they also obviously added more of Viggo and Orlando, because of the sucess of the previous film. I found these thing disturbing, and it shamed Tolkien's perfect tale.
2. Bad editing/pacing. They felt they had to juggle all of the characters more and more throughout the movie, it is very distracting because in the book, Tolkien perfectly went from one group to the next, right when you're getting really excited, so it kept the interest of the reader high. This was not done in the movie however.
3. MORE changes in the story. The film's biggest flaw, they changed more of the story, added some lousy scenes into the movie that weren't in the book, and had some bad add-ons also. This disappointed me because they were pretty good about keeping the movie close to the book in the first movie, what I felt this movie was is a gift to the stupid audiences to make more money.
I just wanted to stress these major flaws because all the reviews I have seen say this movie was great, even better than the Fellowship.
But there are a couple good features in this film, like Gollum is spectacular, I have to take my hat off for the special effects people, because that character was extremely well done.
And I was impresses with Elijah Wood's acting in this movie, he was outshined in the first one, but he really showed his talent in a couple scenes in this one.
Overall, I would say this movie was 7.5/10, but perhaps people would like it if they haven't read the books, and had nothing to compare it to.