Non-Spoilery review

Okay, quick and dirty.
Excellent. Just excellent. More Gimli, good Legolas stuff, Eowyn was great, Grima was great, and the animation on Smealgol was absolutely stunning.
There were scenes where I wanted to see more — not because they felt incomplete, but just because I wanted to enjoy the scene even more and for longer.
Oddly, Helm’s Deep was not one of those scenes. It was the part I thought could have been shortened a bit in favor of more Treebeard, but probably only by a minute, total… I say it could be shorter, but there isn’t really any bit I’d want to lose. Ah well.
I wanted more Treebeard. His section was far too ‘hasty’. Smealgol was excellent.
There’s a rumor going around that a major scene from the second book was moved to the third movie. That is not true: there are two major scenes that were moved, both near the end. Should make the start of RotK ver ver interesting and of course I can hardly wait.
With the first movie, I enjoyed the added scenes on the DVD mostly for the fun of it. In Two Towers, I think they’ll add considerably to my enjoyment (which was already substantial) just because there is SO MUCH going on that it would be nice if there were no arbitrary three hour time limit.
As with the first movie, the timing of some of the dialogue seemed odd and off-center the first time I saw it, but flowed seamlessly the second time — don’t know why that is.
Wanted to see more of Faramir, but I liked the stuff they added to that section of the story. Did I mention Smealgol was brilliant?
Quite a large section was added to this movie that is not in any way in the books, but it was so interesting visually and story-wise that I really didn’t care. It needed to be added to counterweight the stuff that was moved to RotK.
All in all, great stuff, although I think I might have liked FotR just a squige more (this being so very very VERY ‘middle of the story’), but having said that I want to also mention that Two Towers made me want to reread the whole series again more more so than FotR did.
Seeing it twice in the same day might have been, in retrospect, unnecessary, although I’m glad I did it since now I won’t be constantly thinking about it until I see it again.
Again, Smealgol was great.
There are many great little one-liners that I’d love to mention, but I hate reading those myself before I’ve seen the movie because I end up waiting all movie to hear the lines, so I’m not going to mention them. I will simply mention Legolas, Gimli, Samwise the Brave, and Gollum.

8 Replies to “Non-Spoilery review”

  1. The SE edition of the LotR:FotR made me want to re-read the books. Mostly to see what Charaters had been combined, and what things they had tweaked to fill in for the things that had been dropped. I get to see it Friday noonish.
    Can’t wait. Or at least I wait with worm on tongue.

  2. Heh, saw it last night too.
    Troy and I were thinking of creating new DnD characters based on Smealgol. He can do the evil voice almost perfect and I can do the pathetic/good voice almost perfect. Can you imagine how bad we could annoy people??? hee hee

  3. I’ve not read TT for a while, but I did listen to TT on CD when I drove from Portland to Rapid City last march. 18 CDs.
    I for one am glad that they compressed some of the dry-dry action in Rohan and with the Ents.
    Treebeard in the books and the film makes me want to go buy a chainsaw.

  4. Gods above and below… Lori and Troy creating characters based on Smealgol…
    Where’s the gun…

  5. Smeagol/Gollum didn’t steal the whole show at least. just the scenes the he was in.
    “Go…Away.”
    “What did you say?”
    The voice actor deserves a few awards as do the CGI team.

  6. And since the VA also wore the motion-capture suit… the man deserves something, dammit. Splendid, truly splendid work.
    (Watched that thing on TNT a couple of weeks back, showing the guy splashing around in a mountain stream. Better him than me, I’ll tell ya.)

  7. Is it just me or are Elrond and Arwen annoying? I think Tolkien was on to something when he left those two mostly out of the action.

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