Jeremy’s Tophunder №86: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

7 min readApr 22, 2020

This was one of the hardest movies on my list to rank, possibly even the hardest. I had drafts that ranked it in the top 25, and drafts that didn’t have it ranked at all. It ended up making the list, and I think it does deserve to, but it’s one of the movies that I just could never quite seem to get a strong handle on.

I mean, how would you rank a movie that’s three hours long, where the first hour is a solid C, the next hour is a B-, and the last hour is a strong A+?

If you haven’t seen Two Towers lately, trust me when I tell you — the first two hours are boring. Sure, things happen, but none are all that exciting, and a lot of them don’t even really matter to the overall plot. If we’re ranking the Greatest Hits of the first two hours of The Two Towers (in terms of stuff that matters), we’ve got:

Frodo and Sam run into Gollum, who they decide to use as their guide into Mordor.
Merry and Pippin escape the Uruk-hai and head into Fangorn Forest, where they meet Treebeard the Ent.
Gandalf is resurrected as Gandalf the White, and he, along with Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli, travel to Rohan to release King Theoden from the spell placed on him by Saruman.
Whoops, that’s actually the whole list.

Three key plot points in two hours, and only one of them (Gandalf & The Boys riding to Rohan and kicking out the bad guy) is even minimally exciting. The rest of the time is spent on exposition of plot points that don’t totally matter. We see Frodo starting to feel the burden of carrying the ring, which is great and all, but there’s plenty of that in the third movie. We spend a lot of time seeing the king’s niece Eowyn being really obvious about how much she likes Aragorn, which doesn’t really matter at all. We also get some of Aragorn’s backstory of his relationship with Arwen the elf, and we see Elrond warning her that she shouldn’t marry a mortal man, but, once again, it’s not all that relevant to what’s going on, and won’t become relevant until the third movie.

Sure, on some level, it’s cool that Jackson had the foresight to drop these hints in Two Towers, knowing that we’d come full circle in Return of the King, but when you’re watching a three hour movie and seeing time spent on stuff that doesn’t have an impact on anything, it gets a bit annoying.

There’s a weird relationship that I have with the Lord of the Rings series that I might as well talk about here. The scenes with Frodo, Sam, and Gollum are almost certainly my least-favorite component of the series. Frodo gets progressively whinier and whinier, Sam never quite gets the credit he deserves, and as fascinating and creepy as Gollum is as a character, he gets kind of annoying over the course of a three-hour movie. Really, you could argue that these three characters are the three most important characters in the entire series (with arguments to be made for Aragorn, Gandalf, and possibly Sauron, but he’s a bit of a stretch). If the characters (and their story arc) is so central to the arc of the series, it’s a little disappointing how not entertained I am by most of their scenes. The certainly hit their low point here, because they have the unfortunate combination of being not particularly interesting, but they also lack the sense of urgency that they have in the third movie. The character development that takes place is important, and comes into play big time in the third movie, but that doesn’t make it entertaining to watch here. Pretty much any time Frodo and Sam are on the screen, I’m counting down the seconds until we get back to the Rohan storyline.

However, the last hour of the movie absolves a lot of the sins of the first two. You can put the last hour of Two Towers up against any other hour of footage from the rest of the series, even cutting together moments from different movies highlights-style, and I’d still take the last hour of Two Towers. It’s incredible. For my money, it’s clearly the high-point of the entire series, with all three storylines seeing their best moments. Helms Deep is one of the greatest battle scenes ever committed to film, and it lasts for upwards of a half hour. The opening is gripping and tense, the breach of the wall is a true “holy shit” moment, the retreat to the keep feels like the tides are turning and the battle might be lost, and Theoden’s last stand running right into Gandalf’s return with the Rohirrim is the most satisfying conclusion I could imagine. The whole sequence is visually stunning. I genuinely can’t tell how much is CGI and how much is practical effects (miniatures, etc.), which is kind of incredible, considering the movie is almost 20 years old. It’s either some the best CGI I’ve ever seen, or it’s an jaw-dropping degree of detail used in the practical effects.

And that’s only one of the storylines that the last hour features.

Merry and Pippin convince Treebeard to turn towards Isengard, leading to the last march of the Ents (as well as my favorite piece of music in the movie). The Ents attack of Isengard is one of my favorite sequences from the series, done with a combination of CGI and miniatures. The Isengard set was built 1/35th scale, and with the tower standing about 15 feet tall and the walled area about 20 meters across, and they really flooded the entire area to film the sequence, with the Ents and orcs being added digitally after the fact.

Meanwhile, Frodo and Sam are taken to Osgiliath by Faramir, and Sam gives his impassioned speech about continuing on and completing their journey to Mordor. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the best two minutes in the entire series. It’s the perfect ending to the movie, as all the characters saddle up for what they know will be the final stand of good vs. evil in Middle Earth. For as much recognition as the series has received over the years, a surprisingly small amount has been about the acting. I think Sean Astin (and Elijah Wood) are both spectacular in the scene, and overall throughout the movie. It just about makes up for all of the not-super-fun scenes they have in the first two hours of the movie.

So, we have a movie where we spend a lot of time waiting for something to happen, almost to the point of being upset that nothing has happened yet, and then all of a sudden, everything happens at once. I can’t stay too mad at Two Towers, because all of the character development and seemingly insignificant exposition that they painstakingly outline in the first two hours -does- matter. Some of it just doesn’t matter until the next movie in the series. That’s a blessing and a curse. They made the movies to be taken seriously as pieces of art, faithful to the source material. In some places, that makes for not the most entertaining movie. It just so happens that a bunch of that happens all in a row here. But the last hour absolutely makes up for it. It’s almost like they knew that last hour was solid gold, so they could take some extra liberties with the stuff that isn’t the most exciting. Again, I can’t be too mad about it.

The Two Towers, in my eyes, is the worst movie in the series by a rather noticeable margin. But all three movies are great. I’ve loved all three movies to varying degrees since I first saw them. One of my criteria for this list is imagining every single movie is on TV at the exact same time, and ranking movies in part based on which movie I would end up getting sucked into for the next hour. If The Two Towers is on TV, the first two hours rank well outside the Top 100. But the last hour is pretty close to the top of the list. If I try to average all of that out, it seems like somewhere close to the bottom of the Tophunder is a fair ranking.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

17. Ocean’s 11

18. Air Force One

21. The Other Guys

22. Remember The Titans