The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers (12A)

Dark magnificence

Given that this time 12 months ago I hardly knew The Lord of the Rings from Lord of the Dance, it's a surprise as much as a pleasure to report that Peter Jackson's adaptation of JRR Tolkien's epic is turning out to be one of modern cinema's most brilliant undertakings. Its achievement has penetrated even to those who considered themselves sword'n'sorcery agnostics and would dismiss Tolkien as a writer for adolescent nerds. Well, whatever misunderstandings linger over his repute, his stories are providing a magnificent inspiration.

This middle instalment, The Two Towers, deepens and darkens the brooding tone set by its predecessor, The Fellowship of the Ring. Whereas the first film involved some leisurely introductions and scene-settings, this new one hits the ground running and barely lets up during its three-hour span. Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood) is struggling across a perilous mountainscape with his doughty hobbit companion Sam (Sean Astin) and the increasingly onerous responsibility of the Ring, which, as its appointed curator, he must take to Mordor and destroy in the fires of Mount Doom, thus thwarting the dire intentions of the overlord Sauron. Meanwhile, in Rohan, another kingdom of Middle-earth, a desperate rearguard action is being fought by the heroes from Fellowship, Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), Legolas (Orlando Bloom) and Gimli the Dwarf (John Rhys-Davies), who must save King Theoden (Bernard Hill) from the frightful ranks of Uruk-hai warriors dispatched against him by the wizard Saruman (Christopher Lee).

The dense plottiness of this sounds laborious in the telling, yet Jackson sets a pace that feels at once stately and headlong: it has an ominous fluency. The film also restores something that's been missing from cinema for too long, and that is a sense of wonder. The majestic scale and confidence of The Two Towers make George Lucas's Star Wars sequence look like the tinny trash that it is. One can imagine how excited Jackson was to be filming in his native New Zealand, a craggy and largely unpopulated territory that yields up awesome perspectives and stunning horizons. Andrew Lesnie's camera sweeps fluently and massively over mountain ranges, forests thick with foreboding and valleys bristling with armies on the march; he sets characters in front of looming vistas of landscape that recall the powerful romantic urgency of Caspar David Friedrich's paintings. Be warned: you will be cheating yourself and the film to see it only on video or DVD. The big screen was made for movies such as this.

Requiring a language to match these epic dimensions, the screenplay, by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Stephen Sinclair and Jackson, flits between the bog-standard ("Fall back to the keep!") and the baroque: "I have not passed through fire and death to bandy words with a witless worm". At certain critical moments the characters switch to speaking Elvish, which sounds no more or less portentous than their English. What is said in any case feels less important than how it looks, and in this regard every department has pulled its weight.

Grant Major's production design is boldest in its imagery of death and decay, from the smouldering stacks of corpses that constitute the aftermath of a vicious battle to treacherous marshes where the dead float entombed beneath. The last half-hour, a set-piece siege of a stone fortress, features the unforgettable shot of a vast army lit like a city at night gradually, inexorably, spreading forwards. Another shot places Saruman on a balcony addressing an infinity of serried black ranks by night, a reminder that Tolkien was writing Lord of the Rings while the Nazis were ravaging Eastern Europe. Richard Taylor's make-up is also outstanding, most notably in regard to the bloodthirsty Orcs with their putrescent skin and stumpy rodent teeth – creatures from a nightmare, and so many of them.

Not every idea comes off. One feels a drop in energy whenever the scene shifts to two errant hobbits (Billy Boyd, Dominic Monaghan) and their adventures among a gathering of trees that can walk and talk – but slo-o-o-owly. Even these somewhat underpowered scenes don't matter, for they merely sharpen our appetite for the excitement elsewhere. As far as the acting goes, Viggo Mortensen very much looks the part as the high-souled Aragorn, while a nice contrast is maintained between Orlando Bloom as quicksilver bowman Legolas and John Rhys-Davies as the team dwarf, his face not quite invisible beneath the luxuriant broadloom of his beard.

Ian McKellen is slyly suave as the wizard Gandalf, who makes one of the greatest comebacks since Muhammad Ali. Christopher Lee as Saruman furnishes another yard of silken evil. Of the new characters two are of particular interest. The Lord of the Rings tends to be a man's world, followed in order of significance by elves, hobbits, dwarves. Women, I'm afraid, rank further down the scale; the trees get better parts than they do. As in the first film Cate Blanchett and Liv Tyler are awarded slender cameos, but now there's at least a gesture towards feisty womanhood in Miranda Otto's role as a royal niece and admirer of Aragorn.

The other, more insidious newcomer is Gollum, a wizened ghoul of a creature who gibbers, glowers and whips himself into a frenzy as to whether he should help or harm Frodo. It's the Ring, you see; Gollum had this precious metal in his hands once, and now wants it again. His pitiful excruciations are indicative of the film's larger conflict between loyalty and perfidy, between duty and desire. These are temptations Frodo himself has been struggling to resist, a psychological testing that makes The Lord of the Rings, among much else, a great rites-of-passage story. What fate has dealt him can be traced in the haunted gaze of Elijah Wood, and what it will deal him in the future should provide a riveting conclusion to the trilogy. For now, The Two Towers builds and indeed improves upon the tension, intricacy and narrative momentum of the first instalment.