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Notes -
I would dispute calling Two Towers pedestrian. It contains, by my estimation and experience, the greatest fantasy battle ever put to film with the Battle of the Hornberg. I can quibble with some of Peter Jacksons deviations from the book telling, but it is still a masterpiece in building tension, demonstrating the overwhelming odds of the army set against the defenders, demonstrating the heroic feats of our heroes, etc.
There are certainly great scenes.
Taken as a standalone movie, there is uneven pacing, a terrible addition of a Warg battle that eats into runtime with no purpose, and a cringy elf-reinforcement.
But the Two Tower's biggest flaw is how it fails to set up the Return of the King. Very little happens in the movie. By the end of the book, Gandalf and Pippen were on their way to Minas Tirith. Frodo had gotten through Shelob's lair. In the movie Frodo has gone maybe 20 miles and is no closer to Mordor than when the movie started. Isengard is defeated but it was a comparative gadfly next to Mordor.
An inordinate amount of screentime was spent on Rohan and it's plight. We had the sub-plot with the two kids riding to Edoras. We had the Warg battle. We have the "10K Uruk hai are going to destroy the world of men" resulting in an (admittedly epic) battle that feels disproportionate relative to the weight of Sauron's forces in the next movie. We even have Aragorn telling a kid that there is always hope.
In ROTK we don't feel as strongly for Gondor as we do for Rohan. Gondor is not given as much room to breath. There are no sub-plots. Pippen doesn't meet Beregond's son, which would have given us characters to invest in. The activities after Shelob's lair are rushed, with Gondor's army teleporting to the Black Gate and Frodo and Sam covering 50 miles of Mordor in a couple of scenes. Aragorn is never seen speaking to anyone from Gondor in the entire ROTK...because all the time for such conversations was monopolized by TTT.
The trilogy would have been much stronger had the Two Towers been more competently managed.
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