Great, but not quite as good as the first movie

Rating: 9/10 (19 December 2002)

There are two ways, really, to look at a movie: you can deconstruct it and look at the component pieces, or you can look at it whole and just see how it feels.
Let's start by looking at The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers the first way. The action is beautifully filmed, with the vistas creating the proper sense of vastness or intimacy. The acting performance are again all better than mediocre; I mean they were all wonderful and credible, even if there were no (live action) standout performances such Sir Ian McKellan's in The Fellowship of the Ring. The musical score once again lent its epic sensibility; pounding intensely during the battle scenes and smoothly easing the audience in interludes to the action, but never getting in the way. Howard Shore rules our earways.
The screenplay had some minor issues, and there were a few significant deviations from the book, but the dialogue never seemed awkward. Gimli provides some comic relief. Faramir, for example, comes off as a much less level-headed guy than he was in the source material. The Ent scenes left out a lot of Tolkein's art. And Shelob is onhold til the third installment...
The direction impacts the prespective of the shooting, the characterizations and the overall pace. Once again Peter Jackson nearly aces this stuff. The battle scenes are especially memorable and terribly realistic. As reader of the novels, the pacing seemed awkward at times to me, but this is likely a function of the movie being in the middle. There are three plot strands with the same origin, and the same ending point, which are both out of scope for this film.
Which brings us to the plot. The classic good versus evil struggle is maintained with pleasingly clear boundaries, at least at the higher level. The film never gets boring, and is never really trite.
But the real star of this movie is the special effects. And the headliner here is Gollum. One review I read said Gollum still looked computer generated at first, but then we forgot all about that. I agree. Gollum is simply captivating He alternately creepy and pitiful, homely and at times so ugly he's almost cute. The actor, Andy Serkis, who wore a motion capture suit during filming, voiced the character beautifully. As one of my friends who saw the movie with me said, "This is better than anything the Star Wars ever put out."
The fury of the Ents is something to behold. although the Ents themselves are not quite as spectacular. A scene like that might have been corny in a lesser-crafted film, but here it was just awesome.
My thoughts when looking at the film as whole? Not quite as nice as Fellowship, but still nice. My main and only complaint is that I never got invested into Aragorn and the others enough to really deeply care about their adventures. I cared but not just as much as I thought I should. This was likely because there was so much plot in the film.
So technically, TTT was a slighty better film. But I thought FOTR was a marginally better movie, made even more complete in the extended version. I look forward to TTT's extended version, where I expect the minor flaws will be addressed.
9/10