The Two Towers

Saw the Two Towers yesterday, and enjoyed it a lot.
Good

• The split personality of Gollum/Smeagol (even more effective in the movie)
• The fact that the movie series gives the female characters more character than the books do.
• Eowyn ought to be senior at Rohan when her brother cousin dies, her brother is exiled, and her father uncle is incapacitated; the book takes the medieval inheritance rules for granted, the movie sympathizes
• As in the book, the bonding among the male characters (Frodo/Sam, Legolas/Gimli) (In the book, the heterosexual relationships weren’t credible at all; they’re better in the movie)
• The New Zealand landscape
• The ents (though their part is cut in the movie)
• Characters that get unbearably prissy in the book (Aragorn, Frodo) are more bearable in the movie.
• The dead marshes (“or Frodo goes down with the dead ones and lights little candles”).
• Creepy Nazgul (though creepier in the 1st movie).Given the good job with Gollum and the Nazgul, I’m looking forward to seeing what they do with Shelob.
• The various elf-props (in the event of a water-landing, your elf-cloak will serve as a floatation device)
• The strange and pleasant sensation of remembering events from the book as they happen in the movie
• Most important — the sense of being in another world (though the movie can’t recapture the feeling of being fourteen years old, with a boring and subjectively miserable life, transported into a rich and complicated alternate universe.)

Not as good:

• The episodic pacing is tougher to make work in a movie (as in the book; cuts between moody Mordor-route scenes; complicated Helm’s deep battle scenes, Merry/Pippin sublot scenes.)
• As in the book the dialog has its clunky moments. After the first few minutes, though, I got caught up in the story and didn’t notice so much.
• Sauron/Mordor as Ultimate Evil. As in the book, not credible. The internal struggles of the flawed characters are much more interesting.