LOTR: The Two Towers (extended edition)
The GoodI still really like most of the acting. Nearly every character is perfectly cast. The battle at Helm's Deep was really well done and very exciting. The star of this film, however, is clearly Gollum. The CGI, motion capture, and voice work on this character is amazing. When people originally talked about Andy Serkis deserving an Oscar, I thought they were insane. Having seen it, I totally agree. He steals every scene in the film.
The BadThey really deviated from the book a lot in this film. So much so it kind of distracted me. I am not going to list all the deviations as they have been discussed a lot before. Apparently this was originally not suppose to be a stand alone movie and it really shows.
I also dont like the pacing of this film nearly as much as TFOTR. There are a ton of filler scenes in TTT which just reiterate some plot point or motivation we are already well aware of. It is far too long.
Orlando Bloom is really really bad as Legolas. All I can think of when he is on screen is the
Friends episode where Joey talked about "smell the fart" acting where you look to the distance, inquisitive, like someone just farted and you are trying to figure out who. This is how Bloom reads every single line.
The UglyThe me preface this by saying that
Avatar may have ruined previous CGI for me but the CGI in this film seemed far inferior to TFOTR (with the exception of Gollum). Part of this is the CGI characters have a lot more to do in this film and are not simple set pieces. Nonetheless, the CGI is very obvious in nearly every scene.
I
HATED Treebeard and the other Ents. Not only did they look really bad (during close-ups it was so obvious he was a puppet) but Treebeard did not act like the character in the book. Their motivations and actions were completely different. They were portrayed as kind of slow and stupid. It pretty much single handedly ruined the film for me.
Grade:
B-