Ringing true
Those who worry that they may not be able to follow The Two Towers because a) they have not seen its first instalment, or b) they have, but since it was a year ago have forgotten everything - they need not worry.
Like any soap opera, you can pick up the second part of The Lord Of The Rings trilogy from where they left off in 2001 within minutes.
The Two Towers opens with a sequence from The Fellowship Of The Ring when Gandalf the good wizard (played by Sir Ian McKellen) is about to plunge into the depths of darkness.
From then on, the story (lasting some three hours) is pretty self-contained, though it does help if you know who Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), Legolas (Orlando Bloom), Eomer (Karl Urban) and Gimli (John Rhys-Davies) are in order to better understand their relationships.
The star of the show is, surprisingly, not our protagonist Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood), the hobbit who inherits the all-powerful One Ring. His performance is over-shadowed by Gollum, a computer-generated animation.
The gist of the story? The whole film leads up to one huge battle, which is quite a piece of spectacular cinematography. And that's it. Though the film does provide food for thought at a time when our world teeters on the brink of war.
