The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
★★★★½ — The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
There are films that arrive and disappear, and then there are films that reshape what audiences expect from a blockbuster. When Peter Jackson returned to Middle-earth in December 2002 with The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, the second instalment in his adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's beloved trilogy, it landed into a cinema landscape that had already been jolted awake by The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) the year before. The challenge this time was a structural one baked into Tolkien's source material: a middle volume that splits its characters across multiple storylines, denies the audience a clean beginning or end, and asks everyone involved to keep momentum alive across nearly three hours. It is, by any reasonable measure, a tall order.
Jackson, working again through New Line Cinema and his own WingNut Films, shot all three films back to back in his native New Zealand, a production decision that was either audacious or foolhardy depending on who you asked at the time (history has largely settled that argument). By the time The Two Towers reached screens, the cast and crew had been living inside this world for years, and it shows in the texture of the finished film. The Fellowship has splintered by this point, with Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood, returning from the first film) and his loyal companion Sam (Sean Astin) pressing on towards Mordor, while Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) leads his own strand of the story towards the fortress of Helm's Deep. The runtime sits at 179 minutes, and Jackson and his editors make use of every one of them. For anyone curious how Jackson fared when he returned to this kind of large-scale fantasy filmmaking a decade later, the reviews for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013) make for interesting reading alongside this one.
The film's most talked-about element, even twenty-odd years on, is the performance and creation of Gollum, brought to life through Andy Serkis's physical performance and Weta Digital's visual effects work. Serkis was on set throughout, giving his co-stars something real to play against, and the result is a character whose tragedy and menace sit side by side in a way that neither purely live action nor pure animation had quite managed before. Around him, the principal cast is polished but never mechanical: Wood carries the physical and moral weight of Frodo's deteriorating condition, Mortensen is a grounded, weather-beaten presence as Aragorn, and McKellen continues to make Gandalf feel genuinely wise rather than merely theatrical. The film sits squarely in the action and fantasy tradition of early 2000s cinema, a period that also produced genre films of very different scales and ambitions, though few matched this one for sheer scope.
The "worst" of the trilogy… but still an incredible film. The Two Towers does feel like the middle chapter, a bridge between two titans, but it's still packed with unforgettable moments. Helm’s Deep remains one of the greatest battle sequences ever put to screen. Gollum’s introduction as a fully fleshed-out character was groundbreaking, and the world just gets richer and deeper. It’s the slowest of the three and carries a bit of that "middle child" energy, but even at its "worst," The Two Towers is still a staggering achievement.
I find myself coming back to that "middle child" framing more than anything else when I think about where this film sits. There is something slightly melancholy about it, the sense that it exists in service of the chapters either side of it, and yet that has never stopped it being the one I sometimes reach for on a rainy afternoon precisely because of Helm's Deep. A battle sequence that long, that wet, and that relentless probably should not work as well as it does, and the fact that it does is down to Jackson trusting the audience to stay with it. Flawed in the way a good middle act is always flawed, then, but never less than serious filmmaking. Middle child or not, it earns its place at the table.
Rating: ★★★★½ | Year: 2002 | Watched: 2025-04-27
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) on YouTube
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Peter Jackson: King Kong (2005) · The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014) · The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) · The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)
More with Elijah Wood: Green Street Hooligans (2005) · The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) · The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
More from New Zealand: What We Do in the Shadows (2014) · Mortal Engines (2018) · King Kong (2005) · 'Aho'eitu (2015)
More from the 2000s: Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) · Daredevil (2003) · Apocalypto (2006)
More adventure: Alice in Wonderland (1951) · The Eagle (1925) · Louisiana Story (1948) · The General (1926)
More fantasy: Viy (1967) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)
