JUST SAW THE TWO TOWERS. I don’t want to spoil it, so I won’t be too specific. Basic take: (1) Lots more liberties taken with the plot than in the first movie — and while I understand some of them, others mystify me as to their purpose. (2) Big themes, present in the book but much more present in the movie, are temptation and despair — and the temptation of despair. (3) Best actor: Gollum, in his dialogues with himself.

Worst part of the movie: the many commercials beforehand (people booed, and one guy shouted “I came here to see a movie!” to general applause) and the trailers for other movies, pretty much all of which looked absolutely dreadful. A couple of lame horror films, a Jim Carrey movie (the trailer for that one was good — but since all the good stuff from his movies is in the trailers, the movie probably isn’t) and I forget most of the rest.

Overall, where the first movie got a 9.0 -9.5, I’d give this one about an 8. To be fair, the second part of any trilogy is the hardest to carry off — both in movies and in the books themselves — but I felt that Jackson’s hand was too heavy on this one. Still a great job overall, but not as good as the first.

And yeah, Viggo Mortensen’s occasional off-camera antiwar blather notwithstanding, the inevitability of war, and the importance of having the will to resist evil despite the burdens and the horror is a repeated theme, twined in and around the despair and temptation points I mention above. Indeed, one speech in which Aragorn explains to Theoden that this isn’t just the usual raiding, but an effort to stamp out his civilization, seems especially on point.