The Two Towers is the middle part of a trilogy, and can’t help but suffer from that. Having said that, I would add that it could have suffered much, much more. A good comparison would be to George Lucas’s The Empire Strikes Back and Send In the Clones, in both of which I came very close to falling asleep. I did not fall asleep, or even come close, in The Two Towers.

In all three of these films, we take a group of people who were originally working together, break up the group, and then follow the separate adventures of the subgroups. Tolkien did this by splitting the volume into two parts (“books”), in one of which he treated the battle against Saruman on the part of Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Merry and Pippin, and in the other of which he followed Frodo and Sam’s lonely odyssey toward Mordor. While there are (in my humble and lonely opinion) many things that can be criticized in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s method of handling the middle volume of a trilogy is not one of them.

Filmmakers seem to fear this particular method, and prefer to show alternating episodes; so we switch back and forth between Frodo and Sam on the one hand and the anti-Saruman coalition on the other. Luckily, Jackson does this considerably better than those who directed the two above-mentioned Lucas films succeeded in doing. He cuts back and forth from episode to episode with masterful timing.

In the East, Frodo and Sam add a third member to their party — Gollum, the hobbit-like creature who has been corrupted, but perhaps not irreversibly, by the Ring; we can see the inner Sméagol, the original being, trying to break free, and actually succeeding at times. Some critics have already proposed this CGI construct for an academy award; no JarJar Binks, he, but a living, breathing, sometimes frightening, sometimes malicious, occasionally sympathetic little pipestem goblin (built, in the manner of JarJar, over the movements of the actual living Andy Serkis).

Their journey through the Dead Marshes brings them to the Black Gate to Mordor, which puts Skull Island (in King Kong) to shame. Later, after almost being captured by the armies of the Eye at the Gate, they work their way around to the west of Mordor, where they encounter Faramir, brother to Boromir (who died at the end of Fellowship). Here we deviate from the books; Faramir, instead of immediately letting Frodo and company go free to complete their mission, takes them east to Osgiliath. It has been argued that Faramir here is shown as a repetition of his big brother rather than his brother’s antithesis” — but Faramir, unlike Boromir, showed no signs of being corrupted by the nearness of the ring, and when push came to shove he sent Frodo on his way without a qualm, though he knew that, under the rules, this guaranteed his later execution; I suspect that his behavior after the Pool scene was simply the director’s way of getting the party to Osgiliath for a bit of urban warfare and Frodo’s encounter with the Nazgul Lord (also not in the book, at least as I remember it).

In the West, we follow Merry and Pippin to their meeting with the Ents, while Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli re-encounter Gandalf (who recounts, with lots of neat pictures that were missing from the book, his long battle with the Balrog) and then proceed to Edoras, where they rescue King Theoden from the psycho-clutches of Grima Wormtongue. However, the main action of the western adventure takes place in the battle of Helm’s Deep, which was given a single chapter in the novel. And here again, perhaps in the interest of saving time, the Ents succeed in reducing Saruman’s little kingdom to not much of anything, but do not follow through with an excursion to Helm’s Deep. This is the one loss I really regret in the film — the disappearance of the forest from the battle of Helm’s Deep, which I always found raised the hair on my arms when I read of it:

“The land had changed. Where before the green dale had lain, its grassy slopes lapping the ever-mounting hills, there now a forest loomed. Great trees, bare and silent, stood, rank on rank, with tangled bough and hoary head; their twisted roots were buried in the long green grass. Darkness was under them. … Like a black smoke driven by a mounting wind [the Orcs] fled. Wailing they passed under the waiting shadow of the trees, and from that shadow none ever came again.” (pp. 146-147, Ninth Impression 1962 of Houghton-Mifflin 1954 edition). ⁽¹⁾

Unfortunately, this is not something that it will be possible to work into next fall’s augmented DVD release, assuming that there is one … ⁽²⁾ In addition, the forest itself plays no part even at Isengard, with the Ents doing all the work by themselves.

(Hopefully it will be possible to work in the Ents booming out: “Though Isengard be strong and hard, as cold as stone and bare as bone, / We go, we go, we go to war, to hew the stone and break the door!”)

On both fronts, much is missing from the film, and I think I know the reason. The little group with the ring is left sitting below the stairs of Cirith Ungol; Gandalf and company have yet to exile Saruman from being mewed up in Isengard. There is material in The Two Towers that was not treated in the film.

The book The Return of the King is about the same size as the other two works, but much of that space is taken up by appendices, which would probably not be very easy to film, so the actual story material is less than that in The Two Towers, if I’m not mistaken. So it would seem reasonable to borrow items like the encounter with Shelob from the end of The Two Towers and combine it with The Return of the King. The result: We’ll see these things next year in a film of length more or less equal to The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers.

To sum up: worth seeing. I’d go see it again even if I had to pay for it! ⁽³⁾

⁽¹⁾ You can skip this minor conceit if you prefer. Two Esperanto translations of this passage, first the published one of William Auld, second my own.

⁽³⁾ Sam tackles Frodo, saving him from his confrontation with the old Witch-King of Angmar; a ring-crazed Frodo raises Sting to stab Sam through the throat … and suddenly the screen switches to commercials; somebody screwed up on the order of film reels. So those of us who later had the patience to sit through the credits were given re-admission tickets!