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The Lord of the Rings - The Two Towers (Platinum Series Special Extended Edition) Customer Reviews (7 - 9 of 99 Reviews)

OK, but not as good as the Fellowship movie....
After getting through the extended version of Fellowship with no prior interest or knowlege of these films I felt I was prepared well enough for the long "Part II" of this series, The Two Towers.

Well, to be honest I was a little underwhelmed by this movie overall and it's long length started to make itself felt towards the end. The first film was also long but I didn't "feel" that it was too long because it moved with more coherency and things unfolded more naturally. This film jumped around a lot and that's OK as long as things are moving along nicely and the story advances during these scene jumps. Too often, I felt that the individual stories in this film didn't really have anywhere to go or they took too long to get there. It had points where it was truly getting dull... not too much but enough to notice it. There were times that I found myself asking "where is this going?" or "this side-plot had better mean something really important to be dragging like this." Still, the movie did advance the story enough that it is worthwhile to see. Just expect it to feel more dragged out than the first film.

Here is a summary:

GOOD:
- A few good twists and pot shake-ups that I liked.
- Some of the new characters are pretty solid.
- Gollum got a good amount of screen time and I like him.... I even feel sorry for him sometimes!
- An epic battle at the end with some wild action.
- Solid effects and camera work as always!

BAD:
- Stupid side story with Merry, Pippin, & the "alive" trees. The trees are cool and important but this side story received WAY too much screen time and was boring.
- More cases of characters that you think are dead/killed only to reappear later...dont want to spoil it so no names will be mentioned here!
- Frodo and Sam didnt gain much ground and did not get much screen time in this film. They really didn't "do" very much.
- Movie felt a little long, unlike the first one.

OVERALL:

Certainly watchable and if you have the collection then you'll want this movie as well. It's just not quite as good as the first one.

The Best LOTR movie IMO
Everything that came as a shock last December, when ''The Fellowship of the Ring'' was released, we're ready for now: the surging, unfamiliar New Zealand landscapes that serve so well as Middle-earth, the way director Peter Jackson creates a privileged aura of legend while propelling the story forward, the preposterous rightness of Elijah Wood as Frodo, Ian McKellen as Gandalf, Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn, and - really, who knew? - Liv Tyler as Arwen.


The miracle is that ''The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers'' is better: tighter, smarter, funnier, and graced with a more realized sense of epochs shifting on the actions of smallish individuals. It builds cleanly toward the climactic battle of Helm's Deep instead of constantly pausing, as ''Fellowship'' did, for a series of donnybrooks. And it introduces a character who, in Jackson's imagining of him, provides the one thing Tolkien never had much use for: dramatic irony.

That character is Gollum, and he catches up with Frodo and Sam (Sean Astin) early on in the new movie. Since the Fellowship abruptly splintered at the end of the last installment, ''Towers'' shuttles back and forth between the group's constituent parts. Pressing into the country of Rohan to confront the armies of bad-seed wizard Saruman (Christopher Lee) are the three warriors: human Aragorn (Mortensen, eye candy for the ladies), elf Legolas (Orlando Bloom, ditto for the teenage girls), and dwarf Gimli (John Rhys-Davies, comic relief for everyone else).

Spare-wheel hobbits Merry (Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd) are captives of Saruman's orcs until they are rescued by Treebeard the Ent, who is perhaps best described as the apple tree from ''The Wizard of Oz'' minus the sociopathic urges. Frodo and Sam, of course, are bound for Mordor to drop Sauron's one true Ring of power into the fires in which it was forged. Since AAAdoesn't exactly provide a Triptik for this sort of thing, the two are forced to rely on the guidance of Gollum, the slimy, devolved flapdoodle who lost the Ring to Frodo's Uncle Bilbo back in ''The Hobbit'' and who has been lusting slurpily after his ''precious'' ever since.

Gollum is a computer-generated character, and your heart may sink when he first waddles into sight: with his perfectly mottled skin, street-lamp eyes, and deftly rendered strands of lank hair, he pulls the film in the direction of a high-end video game. But the kindness with which Frodo treats Gollum short-circuits the creature's rage and leads to some marvelously bipolar dialogues between his good and evil sides. Gollum's voice and movements are provided by Andy Serkis, and it's a tribute to the actor that by the time ''Towers'' comes crashing to a close, we've accepted Gollum as a full-time member of the crew - and by far the most interestingly conflicted.

True to Tolkien, everyone else is stalwart in heart and deed, and thus a bit of a stick. Characters don't speak in ''Lord of the Rings,'' they declaim, and all that earnestness might pall if the scope of ''Towers'' weren't so convincingly epic. The audience jaws start dropping from the very first scene, which rewinds to Gandalf's battle with the Balrog from ''Fellowship'' but this time plunges over the cliff with the combatants as they wrassle and smite in midair.

It's a sequence most movies would save as a capper; Jackson serving it up before the opening credits roll is just his waggish way of reminding you who's boss.


The main action in ''Towers'' centers on the kingdom of Rohan, which is being assaulted by the combined armies of Sauron and Saruman as a prelude to a full-on conquest of Middle-earth. King Theoden (Bernard Hill) is under the spell of evil adviser Grima Wormtongue (Brad Dourif) - do you deserve to be king if you hire an adviser named Grima Wormtongue? - the prince is dead, his cousin Eomer (Karl Urban) exiled, and Eomer's tough-but-tender sister Eowyn (Miranda Otto) besieged by Grima's unwanted attentions.

When Aragorn and the others arrive to buck up the Rohanians' esprit de corps, he and Eowyn exchange a few heavy-lidded looks - and a good thing, too, since Otto is the most warm-blooded actress to wander into these movies yet. Aragorn's heart, though, remains with faraway elf princess Arwen, and, anyway, who has time for first dates when the armies of the night are approaching in all their terrible computer-generated splendor?

Jackson is one of the very few directors able to fluently combine live-action footage and digital animation, and he has a gift for pop-Wagnerian grandeur that reclaims cinema's primal power. The skirmish midway through between the heroes and Saruman's hyena-riding troops rivals Kurosawa's desperate choreography, and the Helm's Deep wrap-up is as clear as a military diagram and a frightening, panicky chaos.

It's all hooey, of course - unless you're an adolescent or a Tolkien addict, you have to admit this - but it's hooey with conviction, muscle, and wit, and for the film's three hours you're raised up into the kind of exalted storytelling that the ''Star Wars'' and ''Harry Potter'' movies only feebly promise. George Lucas should watch this and hang his head in shame.

A final thought: ''Towers'' is a war film when all is said and done and some will take that all the way to the metaphorical bank. Is it a coincidence that the movie appears as America tries to reinvent itself as a lean, mean aggression machine? Well, yes, it is. In point of fact, ''The Lord of the Rings'' makes a lousy recruiting poster, devoted as it is to the notion that war is hell on Middle-earth.


Anyway, the major structural problem with the story has always been that its archvillain, Sauron, is a smoke-and-mirrors bugaboo - a barely anthropomorphized stand-in for whatever you think is wrong with the world. Some have decoded him as Hitler, while others believe Tolkien's gripe is against the modern industrialist state. If you want to see Saddam Hussein in that fiery eye of Mordor, be my guest - if you squint, Christopher Lee's Saruman might even pass for Osama bin Laden - but keep in mind that it would be just as easy for someone else to see George W. Bush.

My least favorite of the trilogy still great in and of itself
Unlike the Empire Strikes Back or the Godfather Part II which can stand on its own, the Two Towers in many ways needs its preceeding and succeeding films Fellowship of the Ring and Return of the King. The filmmakers do an admirable job of bringing the story to life and make a couple decisions that surely angered fans but all in all it's a great film with one of the best achievements in CG characters and a cool end battle.

We follow 3 distinct storylines: Frodo and Sam continue their journey towards Mordor with the Ring, only now they have a companion in Gollum, an incredibly skinny and mentally messed up creature who happens to have another personality. 2nd story is Pippin and Merry who were captured by Uruk-Hai and have to deal with the Ents, talking trees, for help. 3rd story is Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli tracking down the Hobbits only to end up in Rohan and have to defend a big place named Helm's Deep against at least 10,000 Uruk-Hai.

They're have been several advancements in the realm of digital effects: the water tentacle in the Abyss, the T-1000 in Terminator 2, living dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and bullet time from the Matrix. Well add Gollum to the list as he's not only one of the best achievements in visual effects but he can actually act on screen. It's helped by Andy Serkis whose movements were digitally recorded by computer and animators made it look like Gollum. Plus his voice is really cool, I do it plenty of times at home.

One of the big controversies(among fans anyway) was moving Frodo and Sam's encounter with a big spider named Shelob to film 3, Return of the King. Yeah it's at the end of Two Towers book but chronologically it's supposed to be in film 3, during the Pelennor Fields battle. If it was here, people would go "hey wait a minute! Shelob is not after Helm's Deep, it's during the battle at Minas Tirith!" You can see how fan devotion can sometimes have its problems.

It is the middle film so it's a bit more difficult than Film 1 or 3. It doesn't really have a proper beginning and the ending is slightly cliffhanger-esque. But there's very little to complain such as the CG, music and the characters. Although the Warg attack looks very low budget. All in all, Fellowship's probably my favorite of the 3 with some of the best looking locations but this film does have Gollum and Helm's Deep and the hotness that is Mirando Otto so all is well.

It helps to watch the films in order as while Two Towers isn't terrible by any means, its inability as a stand alone film is a flaw.

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