Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

Let me state for the record that I was about the only one who disliked the first installment of Lord of the Rings, fellowship of the ring (FOTR) at the pictures and boy was I vocal about it as well! I told everyone how it was just a long boring movie with a lot of posing and the occasional fight. I then went and bought the DVD of the movie with an extra 30 mins included, guess what, I loved it! Yep I have had a change of heart and absolutely loved FOTR and began to look forward to the Two Towers (TT). Read on

Synopsis: Frodo & Sam continue their journey to Mordor and enlist the aid of a decidedly dodgy geezer called Gollum. Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli try to help the men of Rohan to resist the armies of Isengard. Merry and Pippin also do their part by trying to enlist the aid of Treebeard and his fellow ents.

Once again I must say that I was disappointed in Lord of the Rings, I went into this movie with great expectations after watching the DVD of the first installment in this trilogy. My disappointment stems mostly from the disjointed and lackluster battle scenes that peppered this movie, ironically this movie is more action oriented than the first one but the actual action sequences are not as good as in FOTR which in itself where just average.

This film spends most of it's running time talking about the coming war between the men of Rohan and the hordes of Isengard and the when the actual battle happens it lasts for about 30 mins but for all that time there is no memorable sequence in it at all! I mean we all remember certain sequences from the Matrix or the Gladiator or even the police station scene from First blood but in this nothing! This is a movie about swords and sorcery you expect at least a great sword fight but no, the best sword fight this year is still in Die another day.

This film is split three ways and each thread deals with a different set of characters. The threads where Frodo, Sam and Gollum's journey to Mordor, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli's quest to save Rohan and lastly Merry and Pippins escape from the orcs and hooking up with Treebread.

Of all these threads Merry and Pippin's seemed tacked on and mostly boring actually, they had to convince Treebeard and the rest of the ents to go to war against Saruman. The ploy they used in the end was quite simplistic and my wife actually found it ridiculous, she insisted the humans also felled trees to build their houses and other implements so why should the ents be more pissed at Saruman than men themselves? Each time they went back to this thread it just stopped the flow of the whole movie and bored the pants of me!

The only scene in this thread that I liked was the attack of the ents on Saruman's fortress but why oh why did not Saruman try and fight back? A bit of fight in Saruman would have added a bit more spice.

Boromir, Boromir where art thou? Sean Bean was sorely missed from this film, his brother Faramir was utterly uninteresting and had none of the screen presence of Sean, plus can someone tell me what the whole Gondor scene was about? A half-assed attack by Sauron's army and also Faramir's motivations just seemed all over the place.

Gollum was for me the star of this movie, this is how CGI should be used, please take note George Lucas. This character was well realised and seemed to be an actual real live person. Apparently this was a lot to do with someone called Andy Serkis who was the basis for this CGI character and actually his whole performance was overlaid on this CGI character. Gollum rules! I loved the scene where Gollum was fighting himself, great!

Another one of the sequences I liked was the battle of Gandalf and the fiery Balrog while falling down this immense chasm, this was done well and I cannot wait to see this on DVD and be able to pause and rewind it.

Aragorn looks good and so does Legolas and Gimli especially when they were chasing the orcs but when they actually had to do some fighting it just did not click for me and what was that with Legolas jumping on a horse?! I'll have to watch that again on DVD to see what exactly was going on there!

Overall I was underwhelmed by this movie and will not watch it again till it comes out on DVD and maybe I may change my mind again like I did the last time!

In conclusion TT was not a bad movie, the sum total of the bad parts and the good parts lead this to movie being just a bit above average, hence:

My movie rating is : 6/10

See ya later,

Shazam!