Linkstew

Okay, I honestly don't have a lot to say about The Two Towers. I enjoyed it probably about the same as The Fellowship, because Fellowship's narrative was just much cleaner -- and that's not the fault of this movie because it's just what they had to work with. I did enjoy it, and I'll probably see it again in the theater (once I see The Fellowship again, because I haven't seen that since the theaters last year), but it wasn't perfect. 4/5

First of all, while I was amused by the idea of how much time Frodo would be off-screen, Merry and Pippin were the two who were really left out. And that's not unreasonable, really: They were my least favorite characters in the books, and their story is comparatively less interesting to moviegoers than everything else going on in the movie. People these days are more interested in "the hotness of Aragorn and Legolas," or even Frodo if you're into Elijah Wood's "young boy" look, than they are in the story of two little people having a big person's adventure instead of giving up and going home. Besides, all Merry and Pippin really brought to the first movie was a bit of comic relief.

But the comic relief in The Two Towers came from several unexpected places, and I thought The Two Towers was significantly funnier than The Fellowship. The only scene I remember the entire theater laughing at in The Fellowship was the scene at Rivendell with Bilbo and Frodo and Bilbo's little "episode" -- which wasn't even supposed to be funny. But at The Two Towers, people laughed at Gimli, people laughed at Gollum's arguments with himself, people laughed at Gimli's and Legolas's exchanges, and people actually even laughed at Merry and Pippin a few times.

If I were a dwarf, I probably would have been offended by the stereotyped portrayal of dwarves (through the jokes by/about Gimli), especially considering there were no jokes with elves as the target. Uh, luckily I'm not a dwarf, so i got to laugh.

Finally, I was a little surprised that there were no affordances in this movie for people who (for whatever incomprehensible reason) did not see the first movie. That's nice for the future, when we'll all just sit down some weekend and watch the whole trilogy, but it did feel kind of weird to just be dropped into the thick of it. The short story is, if you're planning on seeing The Two Towers and did not see The Fellowship of the Ring, for the love of god, go rent Fellowship first or you'll be ridiculously confused. Hell, I was a little confused at times, and I've read the book and seen the first movie a couple of times.

So one of my biggest issues with Episode II was how disjointed it felt. Every time I started to feel like a scene was being established, it was gone. It just didn't flow. And whether that was the fault of too many characters doing too many things in too many places, or the fault of bad directing, I won't speculate.

But Episode II's problems pointed me at a more troublesome question: How on earth is Peter Jackson going to handle the transitions in The Two Towers? The Fellowship of the Ring flowed very easily and obviously as a movie, because they were all together. But the fellowship has been broken, and now the screen time is going to have to be split between three different parties that have practically no communication for the duration of the story.

So I've got a few ideas about how to handle to handle The Two Towers:

• The Two Towers: A Tale in 3 Acts. Theaters will love the intermissions, because they'll triple the opportunity to rip off moviegoers at the snack bar.
• A highlights reel, Olympics style, for those folks who thought the first movie was too long.
• When Frodo isn't on the screen, the other characters should be sad, look around, and say "Where's Frodo?"