So, I finally saw The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers yesterday.

I have, very, very confusing feelings about it. On one hand many of the sequences were excellent, specially the battle sequences. The Ents were great. But... but... the overall 'product' left me disatisfied. At times I felt as if -gasp!- I was about to fall asleep!. It seemed soooooo looong. I think the story suffered from the chop-and-dice work they did on it to adapt it to film: the second book is actually divided in two, with the first part dealing with Aragorn, Legolas, Merry, Gandalf, etc, and the second part dealing with Frodo, Sam and Gollum/Smeagol. In the book, this keeps the action running along really fast, and you can't wait to turn to the next page. In the movie, the mixing of these two stories into one only makes everything muddled and slow: the pace is completely lost. There is no time to perceive the 'atmosphere' of each of the stories. Frodo's journey becomes incredibly dark close to the end of book 2. The movie doesn't do justice to that at all.

Finally, the end was cut off at a different point. I didn't like that either, but I think in movie terms it makes some sense at least. Not too great overall. We'll see how they end it. Everything depends on the next and final installment of the trilogy. In any case, we'll always have the books :-).