[7.8/10] *Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers* is a whole season of television jammed to fit into a single three-hour movie. There’s so many, mostly disconnected bits of the story that happen at a remove from one another. *Fellowship of the Ring* has its own issues, but they tend to veer more toward a film that feels like it plays out on rails, with the good guy meeting and assembling and meeting one another on a pre-set path whether there’s room in the plot for it or time for the audience to care about each new face.

*The Two Towers*, by contrast, tries to combat that problem by making an *Empire Strikes Back*-style move for the sequel, splitting up the central teams into various side quests. Frodo and Sam firmly encounter Gollum (and his unique personality), and then run into Faramir, Boromir’s brother, whose men are prowling the plain. The Hobbit B-team escape their Orc captors and find refuge in the Ents, walking trees on the fence of interfering in the world of men. And the alliance of Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli initially set out to rescue the B-team hobbits, but find themselves in Rohan, another free city of men, and help defend the kingdom and his people against Saruman’s approaching army.

That’s all before you get into Gollum’s recurring moral dilemma, and a love triangle between Aragorn, his immortal Elf crush, and some princess he’s making goo goo eyes at, and before…you know…Gandalf freaking coming back to life.

Suffice it to say, there is *a lot* going on in *The Two Towers* and Peter Jackson and company are not quite able to get the pacing and editing and structure of the movie right to make so much incident and character packed into these events just right. Battle reaching a crescendo feature cuts to deliberately slow-talking trees debating the finer point of military intervention. Otherwise triumphant or crestfallen moments are interspersed with dreamland dalliances between Arwen and her human squeeze. The introductions and deaths of characters who basically walk on the screen, give two lines, and then must be treated with the utmost importance for reasons unknown is still a Middle Earth malady here.

But man, that battle. I’d go so far as to say that in the nearly twenty years the Battle of Helm’s Deep burst onto the silver screen, it’s been topped. Several *Game of Thrones* skirmishes, other cinematic war epics, and scads of *LotR* imitators have built on this form, with varying degrees of success. Still, there’s just something about the epic set piece at the heart of *The Two Towers* that sets it apart, both in how it pioneered some of the approaches that soon became the standard, and in how it includes so many little touches and character moments to make this more than a mutual blast of roaring swords and screeching steels.

We get two Big Damn Hero moments to give the battle some structure, with Elrond’s Elf crew coming to aid at the last minute an unleashing those elven arrows on the advancing Uruk-hai so that the Rohan women and children stand a chance. And if that’s not enough, Gandalf the White (having survived his encounter with the Balrog with a mere bump on the noggin’ and a spiffy new wardrobe change) frees the King from Saruman’s spell and brings their loyal men from far flung places to help defend the homeland. More than the raw spectacle of that seminal battle, the character touches – Gimli hugging a thought-dead Aragorn, the two little kids we barely met ending up safe, the King’s doubts over whether this is the right course and eventually throwing himself in the fray – that make it more than the sum of its parts.

But they’re damn good parts, though! The prospect of a war on two fronts is an appropriately ominous one, especially with the franchise’s would-be narrators giving high-fantasy color commentary to that effect. Still, whether it’s legitimate medieval military tactics or not, the Uruk-Hai throwing up their ladder and barging their way through the gate while the Rohan alliance tries to stall their climbers and brace the door is a thrilling bit of editing and production design. The controlled chaos of those moments, these two heaving bodies of people working against one another, bear out in what is arguably the franchise’s most iconic and imitated set piece.

*The Two Towers* just spends a lot of time to get there, and not all of those side quests are feeding into or building to that moment later in the film. The back-up Hobbit squad convincing the Ents that this is their war too leads to some other neat production moments. The Ents look and move in a distinctive fashion, and their stepping in to help Gondor will surely count for something. But a great deal of Merri and Pippin wandering through the forest with them feels like killing time before they’re needed, however slightly, for the final battle.

The same goes for the Aragorn/Arwen/Eowyn love triangle that pretty much sprung out of nowhere. Aragorn is really a weak link here. While in *Fellowship*, he could at least emerge from the shadows and prove himself a noble, valuable ally with the royal connections that could one day matter, here, is the generic fantasy hero guy, shouting orders and slashing swords as needed. Given that focus, it’s more than a little awkward when the movie cuts away from the proceedings to depict him struggle with his shared promise to Arwen and the smile from this random chick he just met.

At least it ties into one of the overarching themes of the film – how this is a challenge that prevents all these disparate groups from simply retreating to their otherwise unbothered homes and just letting things play out. This is a threat to all of them – Sauron’s black army – and it requires disparate groups with long histories to set them aside and join together to fight a foe who poses an existentialist threat against all of them. There’s a lizard brain joy when old friend or enemies turned allies show up in a time of need, and *The Two Towers* plays that for all it’s worth.

It also related to the idea of our connections with people, the way we can see ourselves in others, as both our best and worst selves, and most struggle to bring out the best while repelling the worst. That’s most notable in the Gollum-centric parts of the movie, where Samwise continues to be skeptical of their grotesque fellow-traveler, while Frodo, knowing first-hand what The Ring does to a person, has empathy for the wretched creature, and the kindness he extends helps Gollum make the first progress he’s made in forever.

It’s ginger progress, that causes Gollum self-back and forths about the nature of what he really is, his guilt, his possibility to be more. Andy Serkis and his team put in the best performance of the movie despite the CGI limitations, managing to show the piteousness of Gollum, his sympathetic qualities, and also the duality of him, the ways in which he is like an addict who means well and speaks honestly, but whose desire for the thing he cannot have makes him dangerous. It’s a fine line to walk, but *The Two Towers* walks it while showing how Frodo has to believe, for his own sake, that there’s hope Gollum can come back from this.

Samwise delivers that message in the best speech of a speech-loaded film. This is the middle chapter of the *Lord of the Rings* -- the one between the thrill of introduction and the catharsis of conclusion, where stories typically have to continue setting the table for the finale and show our heroes at their lowest point. Sam recognizes this as a lowest point, with so many of them split up, diminished, or dead. But he also recognizes the hope in that they’ve gotten this far, that they’re come together, that there’s still the chance for victory despite the long odds stacked against them. *The Two Towers* spends a great deal of time digging around with those new threats and depositing in new characters without enough time to really give them any shading beyond high fantasy pronouncements. But it delivers the *Lord of the Rings*’s greatest battles and gives us reason to hope through our heroes’ camaraderie and measured successes, even in the midst of the dark times and defeats.