Middles aren’t glamorous, but they don’t come any better than The Two Towers. All serve to perfectly set up The Return of the King to finish Tolkien’s epic. The film also introduced a completely new type of acting to bring Gollum to life, and features a finale with two epic battle sequences. Gollum, Treebeard, Theoden, Eowyn, Eomer, Faramir, Wormtongue, and others all have to be introduced, Gandalf re-introduced, and all are done so without short-changing any. The Fellowship of the Ring ended on such a high-note and cliffhanger that The Two Towers could have easily dropped the ball on all of the pitfalls of a middle chapter, or shortchanged all of the characters that aren’t even introduced until the second film. Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens structured the film version of The Two Towers much differently than the book, pushing much more of the finale into The Return of the King while using The Two Towers as the crux of character development in the trilogy. Narratively much more complex than the linear Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers follows the splintered fellowship on their various journeys while introducing a host of new characters. A perfect bridge movie is rare, and with the possible exception of The Empire Strikes Back, the best one ever made is The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. You can lose the momentum of your opening and set up narrative hurdles for the finale that are impossible to overcome. They tend to be the darkest night before the dawn of the finale, but it’s possible to go too dark. In planned trilogies, middle chapters are the trickiest. Click on the link here to check out previous installments from #1 The Shawshank Redemption to #14 Inception. We’re on our fifteenth installment in this series. These are movies that are hard to just pry five gems from, but we do and examine the film overall. These are movies that transcend a simple “My Favorite Scene” column. Every other month, we take a look at a movie from the Internet Movie Database’s List of the TOP 250 FILMS OF ALL-TIME.
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