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The Lord of the Rings - The Two Towers (Platinum Series Special Extended Edition) Customer Reviews (34 - 36 of 99 Reviews)

A spectacle that builds off the first movie
Contains spoilers.

Having seen the Toronto premier, I must say that I was very pleased with the Two Towers. It is not only spectacular in it's SFX and set design, it provides us characters, both CGI and human, that are interesting. However, it may upset (not me though) LOTR junkies because it is not completely faithful to the book.

The first scenes of the movie had me hooked, where they go back to the battle between Gandalf and the Demonic Balrog under the mines of Moria. As in the first book, Gandalf seems to be lost, but they extend the battle as the two mighty characters seem to fall to the center of the earth. It is an amazing scene that will have your mouth gaping. However, that is shown as a dream sequence to Frodo/Sam's quest to get to Mount Doom to destroy the ring of power.

The other plotline has Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli tracking a party of Uruk-hai who have kidnapped Merry and Pippen (the other two Hobbits). However, by the time they reach them, all the orcs are killed by the Riders of the Rohiddim, soldiers of a Kingdom called Rohan. The party discover that the hobbits were not killed but hid in the mysterious Fangorn forest, a mystic place that mortals dare not enter. They meet up with Gandalf in the forest and head to Rohan, since he has found the hobbits and left them in the protection of the Ents, a tree race that protects Fangorn.

In the capital of Rohan, they find out about Saruman and Isengards march of 10000 orcs to destroy their land. The King is under the spell of an evil sage named Grim Wormtongue and Gandalf breaks the spell. Wormtongue is banished and heads to his true master, Saruman. The Rohan's abanddon their city and head towards Helm's Deep, their siege fort, where they will make their last stand. Saruman, knowing this, sends his troops there, hoping to block them off and destroy Rohan. Meanwhile, Gandalf goes to find the King's nephew Eomer, who was banished by the King while he was under the spell of Wormtongue.

Meanwhile Merry and Pippen meet Treebeard, one of the oldest Ents. They try to convince him that Saruman has become evil but the Ents have no interest in joining the war, until they find out that Saruman is destroying the forests to run his great underground steel mill. They have a change of heart and prepare for the siege on Isengard.

Finally, Frodo meets and captures Gollum, the adversary of Bilbo Baggins in the book "The Hobbit". As they prepare to finish him off, Gollum tells them that they cannot enter Mordor because Sauron has built a giant gate and offers an alternative way in. During this way, they fall in between a conflict between the Harzad (servants of Sauron) and the fighters of Gondor. They are captured by Faramir, the brother of Boromir and will be taken to Miras Tinir to have the ring given to his father to fight the war.

As you can see, the plot is dense but Director/Writer Peter Jackson fills in much of the holes. He also adds parts that are not in the novel, such as the love triangle between Aragorn, Eowyn and Arwen. Also, in the second part, I don't remember the Elves escaping from Rivendell to their ancient homeland of Valoria across the sea, nor do I remember a legion of Elves under Haldir going to assist the Rohan's defenses, but for me, these were not negatives, but helped with the plot. As well, in the book, the first half is devoted to Helm's Deep and Isengard, while the second half is the quest. It is broken up here, but IMO, that was a good thing since JRR's way would have bored people cinematically.

Other differences from the book is that Aragorn and his party do not meet up with the Ents and the Hobbits in Isengard and the movie ends about 50 pages before the novel does and you do not get to meet "her" (LOTR fans will know what I'm talking about).

For those who have not read the novels, there maybe some confusion where characters or people appear out of nowhere, but were discussed in the book (like the Ents), or Faramir happening to be the brother of Boromir. I also suggest that those who have not seen the original LOTR: FOTR or watched in a while, rent it againt to be refreshed.

Of the the new characters, Smeagol-Gollum is the best. Jackson makes Smeagol pathetic enough to be sympathetic to the audience (especially with his big eyes and naive childish attitude), but makes Gollum evil enough to make him seem like a real threat. Smeagol also is the best CGI character I've seen to date. After a few minutes, you would think that he existed in real life. Andy Serkis does an amazing job with the voice. John Rhys-Davis does the best here, injecting humor into his Gimli character (the reference to Dwarf tossing is timeless) and with the towering voice of Treebeard. Other new characters that support the movie well are Karl Urban who plays Eomer, David Wenham who plays Faramir and Brad Dourif who plays the slimy Grima Wormtongue.

I was not impressed with Miranda Otto as Eowyn, mostly because she is supposed to have major chemistry with Aragorn (Viggo Mortesen) but doesn't and I was also unhappy with Frodo, because in the novel, he goes from fresh faced no-nothing to a wiser person, but Jackson instead played up his "turmoil" with the ring. He is also supposed to have a fatherly role with Smeagol-Gollum, but it does not come through on screen.

Finally, the battle scenes....Yes they are amazing and tremendous to take in, but it was sensory overload at times. It just keeps going and going and becomes wearisome after a while. But don't get me wrong, this was a minor complaint. I know this movie is supposed to be darker than the first movie, but let me tell you, it made Gimli's jokes all that funnier.

Overall, this is probably the "Don't miss" movie of the Christmas season. I give Peter Jackson and the whole crew kudos for making a movie that will both entertain and memorable....Rating: B


Just As Good As The First
Orcs are everywhere. Frodo Baggins continues his quest to destroy the ring. That's all that's going on. It's cool. Cooler than I thought it would be. It is a follow-up from "Fellowship of The Ring." THAT was awesome to begin with. You have to see that first to know whaaaatttt'ssss happenin'. MMM-KAY?
Sure, there are problems. There always are problems in this trilogy. I just love fantasy movies. I cannot think of more than 2 people who don't like films like this. Some who like it still occasionally fall asleep. You know it's NOT THAT boring. Classic series.

Better than the first. Still part of single great work.
`The Two Towers' is the second of the three movies capturing the novel, `Lord of the Rings' by philologist J. R. R. Tolkien. This is one of the most influential popular novels of the 20th century. Other bases of big motion pictures such as `Ben-Hur' and `Gone With the Wind' can't hold a candle to it as it had an influence far beyond its role as the basis for a movie script. For starters, `Lord of the Rings' has had a large and growing readership from its original publication in the mid 1950s to the present, while I suspect practically no one reads Lew Wallace's `Ben-Hur' any more and few people have recently read Margaret Mitchell's `Gone With the Wind'. Another `Lord of the Rings' offspring is the whole `Dungeons and Dragons' role playing games phenomenon. This game originally appeared a few years after the second blooming of `Lord of the Rings' popularity in 1965, when the books were published in paperback by Houghton Mifflin in response to a pirated copy published by Ace. This is when I first became enraptured by the stories of Middle Earth.

It is impossible to speak of any one of the three movies by themselves as they do not in the usual sense of the word form a trilogy of three independent films related by common characters, location, and history. `The Lord of the Rings' was a single novel which was serialized in three volumes published over two and a half years in the mid 1950's. When the three titles are published in a single volume, it is not hard to see that the work is really not much longer than `Gone With the Wind' and it is certainly shorter than some notable novels such as `Atlas Shrugged'. One virtue we did get from the division into three titles by Tolkien is that Peter Jackson had a valid basis on which to split a single story into three long movies totaling close to 10 hours of viewing time.

Unlike the movies of the first and third books, almost every major scene of the book `The Two Towers', is captured in the movie. The chapters of Merry and Pippin with Treebeard and the Ents are shortened a bit. Seems as if the Ents are much too slow for 21st century cinema. One thing the movie did get wrong in its promotional artwork is the suggestion that the two towers of the title were Orthanc and Baradur, the fortress of Sauron. Actually, the second tower of the title is Minas Morgul, the city of Gondor, originally named Minas Ithil, but renamed when the Nazgul captured it several years before the start of the events in `Lord of the Rings'. Minas Morgul plays a much bigger role in the middle of the story than does Sauron's stronghold. Part of this change of tower may be due to the fact that some of the action involving Minas Morgul was moved to the third movie, `The Return of the King'.

The only piece of action I really miss is the role of Fangorn in the defeat of the besiegers of the Hornburg. And, in one of the very rare Peter Jackson additions to the story, I thought the skirmish between the Rohrrim / Aragorn and Saruman's warg riders was great cinema action, but just too much of a replay of Gandalf at the bridge in Moria, where a principle character is thought to have been killed and lost.

I have read `The Lord of the Rings' at least 10 times, and the story of Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli from the banks of the Anduin to the victory at the Hornburg is by far one of my favorite parts of the novel. Treebeard comes in a close second, as he is a part of the same ancient history of Middle Earth to which only the faintest hints are given in the stories of Fangorn, The Old Forest by the Shire, and Tom Bombadil. Basically, Bombadil and the Ents stand for what is most worth saving from the evil of Sauron. This innocence is something that is tainted even in the sheltered lives of the Hobbits.

In contrast, after about the third or fourth reading, I often became anxious to get through the chapters about Frodo, Sam, and Gollum as quickly as possible. One of the greatest of Jackson's accomplishments in the films was to breath life into the characterization of Frodo Baggins, who always seemed to be to be something of a wimp, drawn along by the inexorable hand of fate. Sam, on the other hand, was pursuing the quest entirely out of love and grit. Another great service of the movie was the realization of Gollum. I think that Gollum's implementation may be about as close as we will come for a long time in seeing a computer generated character be nominated for an Academy Award for acting.

Even though `The Two Towers' is the middle third of a very long three part movie, it really has a much more satisfying ending than `The Fellowship of the Ring'. One starts to see how it may be possible to defeat the great evil challanging all the good guys in the story, but of course, the difficulty of Saruman's defeat is just a way of showing that defeating Sauron will be just that much more difficult.

The second of the great three part classic!

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