Practicalmadness

For what it's worth, I was a little disappointed by The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, although it's the sort of disappointment created by heightened expectations. I wouldn't say that Two Towers failed to live up to my expectations -- it's an incredible movie that filmically tops even its predecessor. Rather, I was expecting something a little more like Fellowship and got something a little more like Braveheart.

Whereas the first movie spent plenty of time with the characters, especially the hobbits, this new chapter is almost non-stop action. "It's minute 10 -- do you know where your orcs are?" Piled on the ground, probably, as this movie goes through orcs faster than George Lucas goes through smoothies.

The only thing speedier than an orc-slaying here is the introduction of major new characters, as in the same time it took Fellowship to show us just the hobbits, Gandalf, Saruman and the Black Riders, we are introduced to the entire kingdom of Rohan, its enfeebled king Theoden (Bernard Hill, best known for playing the captain in Titanic), his shieldmaiden* niece Eowyn (Miranda Otto) and loyal nephew Eomer (Karl Urban), the foul Grima Wormtongue (Brad Dourif), Cute Rohan Refugees #1 and #2 (played by Peter Jackson's kids...ain't they cute?), Riff Raff (Richard O'Brien, or at the very least, his orcish cousin)...and I think Jackson even manages to squeeze in the introduction of the Ents, the long-awaited debut of Gollum (Andy Serkis), the Black Gate of Mordor and the resurrection of Gandalf, all within that same half hour or so.

So when reviews say that The Two Towers expands the world created in Fellowship, they mean it. Early and often.

The Two Towers is the most worked-on, storywise, of the three films; whereas Fellowship was an extremely faithful adaptation of Tolkien's novel, Two Towers makes major departures, usually to better and more interesting places than anything Tolkien ever thought up**. It's proven to be Jackson's approach to off-load a lot of the major plot developments of Book Two (the discovery of Saruman's palantir, that whole business about the giant spider) onto the other movies, which is good, because after seeing Orcstravaganza! III: That's Evisceration!, followed by The Biggest Battle In Cinema History, followed by the winged Nazgul, followed by Gollum playing his own ventriloquist's dummy, a giant spider just might seem like overkill.

** Except for Evil Faramir.