Visually stunning, but ultimately disappointing esp. if you have read the book

Rating: 6/10 (24 January 2003)

Geek alert - this is written by a fan of the original books. If you never read them, my guess is that you won't find this review very illuminating - I just had to get it off my chest :-)
After being completely swept away by the amazing Fellowship of the Ring, this was a disappointment. I completely agree that there must be changes when a book is made into a movie. In the Fellowship of the Ring, most of Jackson's changes to Tolkien's tale were judicious - to diminish the amazing number of subsidiary characters somewhat (substitute Arwen for Glorfindel), even to cut out long sequences made sense to keep the length of the movie reasonable (no Old Forest) since there really wasn't one minute I would want to cut from what was actually in the movie.
Not so with the Two Towers. Many of the most exciting scenes from the book are gone or altered beyond recognition and in their place are long and (I hate to say it) boring sequences which don't further the plot or anything else.
{spoilers, film and book}
* The book's fight over Merry and Pippin between Sauron's and Saruman's orcs, essential to why the book and the movie is called the Two Towers, is completely gone.
* The unexpected beauty and courage Frodo and Sam according to the book found in Ithilien on the threshold of Mordor are in the film changed to depict violence and power abuse. Faramir's role in the movie is instead a quick and superfluous recap of Boromir: He wants to use the Ring, but in the end he comes round.
* In the film Frodo here comes face to face with a Nazgul - but if Sauron thus knew the Ring was just outside Mordor, he probably wouldn't march on Minas Tirith, as he (I presume) will do in Return of the King.
* The added scenes include Aragorn being left for dead and dreaming of Arwen, who is being bullied by Elrond into leaving Middle Earth. This seems completely pointless, and I find the added scenes with Arwen annoying to a degree that makes me root for Eowyn as Queen of Gondor.
* Another added scene is Haldir arriving at Helm's Deep with an elf army out of Lorien - this may seem to be a detail, but it changes the story on a fundamental level, so instead of being about Man rising to the challenge it becomes Elf going out with a bang. Also, it contradicts the opening sequence where the voice-over (quite rightly according to the book) states that the defeat of Sauron by Elendil and Gil-galad was "the *last* alliance of Man and Elf".
* Another change for the worse is to the Ents. First of all, Fangorn brings the hobbits to Gandalf to ask him what to do. Would the leader of the most ancient species do that? Second the Ents' decision of going to war. In the film, the Entmoot is a joke - it goes on forever because entish is a very slow language (as in the book) but they decide not to do anything (unlike in the book). However, when Fangorn sees the trees felled by orcs (how come he didn't know about that already - he is after all tree-herd of the Forest) he can suddenly give a lot of information in a single shout and in the blink of an eye all the composed Ents are suddenly marching to war.
* Then there is the film's crude exorcist scene with Theoden. That would have been a lot more effective if it had been more subtle. And I sorely missed the dialogue between Theoden, Gandalf and Wormtongue which is among the book's finest.
* Lastly, we see nothing of the book's growing, unlikely friendship between Legolas and Gimli. Instead Gimli is only in the movie as comic relief. A movie needs comedy, but maybe it could have been distributed a little more evenly so a whole character didn't have to be eliminated.
{end of spoilers}
Besides these alterations to the story, I just found the movie long and at times boring. Where its predecessor jumped from one amazing scene to the next and almost seemed too compact (I enjoyed the extended version even more), for all its battle scenes this movie is at times almost at a stand-still.
All that aside, Jackson continues the most vivid and captivating visualisation of Middle Earth ever. Gollum is really spot-on. The viking theme chosen for Rohan works out well. This movie gets 6 from me.