The army of darkness sprawls into the horizon. Under the night rain, the soldiers stretch back like the world's most evil marching band; the vastness of the force would be forbidding even if it weren't made up of bloodthirsty, teeth-gnashing humanoids known as uruk-hai. Have no doubt: When Saruman (Christopher Lee), the elegant wizard of nastiness in Middle-earth, gets angry, the guy knows how to unleash the storm clouds of war. Standing atop his fortress, Theoden (Bernard Hill), the honorable but mild-spirited leader of the besieged Rohan kingdom, is as outnumbered as Henry V was at the Battle of Agincourt.

Within moments, the arrows fly, and so do the vicious forked catapults, and there is much more -- a raging flood, a handful of men on horseback plowing through a mass of black-armored demons, who go flying off the sides of a castle bridge. The armies, glimpsed from the sky, aren't just clashing; they're roiling. To describe the battle of Helm's Deep, the spectacular deathly cataclysm that's the climactic sequence of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, as ''big'' would be an understatement. It's downright biblical (or, at the very least, virtually so), with a dimension of David-and-Goliath suspense. As Agincourt proved, the size of your army isn't everything.

A year ago, when the first installment of Peter Jackson's three-part, $300 million adaptation of the J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy was released, its elemental vision of good and evil locked in cosmic battle was said, by many, to echo moviegoers' post-9/11 feelings about the state of our own world. That same dynamic may turn out to be even more true of the sequel. In ''The Two Towers,'' the Fellowship has splintered, yet it isn't just Frodo (Elijah Wood), the reluctant, marble-eyed hobbit whom fate has chosen to destroy the Ring, or the nobly handsome Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), or Gandalf (Ian McKellen), the acerbic wizard with the trilling diction, who need to gather their forces together. So must the disparate tribes, clans, and provinces of Middle-earth. Those hesitant to support the conflict have to be convinced; by the end, even a marvelously charming ancient talking tree joins the coalition. All this to defeat a thin-faced, gray-bearded megalomaniac in mystic robes who is intent on starting -- and winning -- the mother of all wars.

The defining element of ''The Two Towers,'' however, isn't just the cosmic Manichaean zip of its black-and-white universe, the potent aura of sweeping invisible doom. It's that the heroes are so clear-souled and upright that they're effectively purged of internal struggle; their battle is exclusively with forces outside of themselves. That was never the case in, say, ''Star Wars'' -- or, indeed, in any counterworld adventure movie that I can honestly say I'm stirred by. It's true, of course, that Frodo is meant to be engaged in a love/hate battle with the Ring's ambiguous powers. But the image of Elijah Wood's cherub face squinting in torment once every hour or so as he fingers, or momentarily slips on, the Ring has a peculiar aura of abstraction as a dramatic device. As staged, it's a token sliver of conflict -- a signifier of valor in the making rather than the genuine article.

Packed with awesome mountains and glades, swooping God's-eye camera movement, and enough chatty forest oddballs and light-show apparitions to send every other scene skittering off in a new direction, ''The Two Towers,'' as a visual pageant of sorcery and action, all but surpasses ''The Fellowship of the Ring.'' This one too, though, is mired in the wooden grandiosity of Tolkien's ponderously literal-minded medieval imagination. There's one character who breaks out of the box of chivalric stuffiness, and that's Gollum, the desiccated elfin beastie in a loincloth who becomes the captive comrade of wandering hobbits Frodo and Sam (Sean Astin).

It's not every day that a special effect turns in a splendid performance (E.T. comes to mind), but Gollum, voiced in a slithery hiss-whisper by Andy Serkis, whose movements also provided the basis for the CGI wizards, has a cackling, maniacal, yet weirdly forlorn charisma. So cadaverous that his bones press through his skin, with oversize eyes that pop out of a shrunken bald head, he's like the Starchild from ''2001'' grown up into a raspy crackhead. Gollum is a creature who gave in to the temptation of the Ring (he still calls it ''my precious''), and it ruined him. Frodo wants to trust him, but this divided soul keeps lapsing into good Gollum/bad Gollum dialogues with himself that make him sound like a Shakespeare villain gone psycho. He's the one character in the picture whose course of action doesn't feel as if it's been plotted out on a flowchart.

''The Two Towers'' conjures an illusion of the gravity that you want from an emotionally charged storybook epic. Really, though, what it comes down to is superbly staged battle scenes and moral alliances forged in earnest yet purged of the wit and dynamic, bristly ego that define true on-screen personality. Viggo Mortensen has a livelier aura of derring-do this time around, but his token flirtation with Liv Tyler only ends up calling attention to what a desexualized cosmos Tolkien created. The film keeps tantalizing us with the prospect of Mordor, the land of darkness that harbors the mountain of fire where Frodo must cast the Ring in order to destroy it. Will he find anything that truly shakes him up there? In ''The Two Towers,'' evil is omnipresent yet finally too weightless to be memorable, and so, too, is a hobbit whose ruling quest is to destroy the one thing that tempts him most.

During one take while filming the scene when Aragorn
is floating down the river, Viggo Mortensen
was dragged under water for many seconds. He managed to
kick himself back up off a rock, perhaps saving his
life. A safety team then rescued him and took him to shore.

In the cave scene where Faramir lifts the Ring from under Frodo's shirt, David Wenham was afraid of
accidentally stabbing Elijah Wood so a swordsman was called on to do the scene.

While filming the trilogy, Viggo Mortensen got so into character that during a conversation, 'Peter Jackson'
referred to him as "Aragorn" for over half an hour without him realizing it.

Did you know that the scream of anguish Aragorn lets
out upon coming to the edge of Fangorn Forest and
thinking Pip and Merry have perished, was not really acting? He had
just kicked the Uruk-kai helmet for the fifth time and
had broken two of this toes.

"For Merry, losing Pippin is like losing his strength,
the other side of his personality."

~ Monaghan on Merry and Pippin's strong friendship in LotR.

"I hold Treebeard (In The Lord of the Rings) quite close to my heart.
He takes things very slowly -- he knows that he'll live forever,
so he can spend as much time as he wants mulling things over. I'm turned on by that because I don't think that way."

~ Dominic Monaghan

Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan spent so much time up
the tree (TreeBeard) during the making of the the
film that they spent their time between takes
writing a screenplay. Additionally, it was so
difficult to get up and down to their "perches"
that they were left there during breaks while the
rest of the crew went off to eat, though someone
was kind enough to pass theirs up to them.

"I'm a big fan of the ladies
so to have them come to me without any real effort is amazing." ~ Dominic Monaghan

The Two Towers Premire

????? ??

Two Towers Premire: PARIS

2003 Golden globes

Empire Awards 2003

"Intresting" Captions

Strange Gondorian tortures perhaps???

Did it now? That's very intresting, here's your straightjacket Mr. Frodo.

Seriously, does no one proof read these?