Countdown

"Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" is set to open in 10 hours. The book is excellent, though I found Tolkien's neat split of the tales of the two halves of the Fellowship a bit sterile; I'm glad to hear Director Peter Jackson has mixed them up.

TIME magazine's cover story from December 2 says the Two Towers "begins in medias res, as though you had just stepped out for a few seconds to get more popcorn. If you didn't see last year's The Fellowship of the Ring, Peter Jackson, the trilogy's wizardly director, isn't about to cut you any slack."

Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post takes a more enigmatic view. As well as reporting that "the last hour of "The Two Towers" is pure combat and it's mind-blowing", he talks about his own preferences - "Because I have no imagination for little critters, I preferred the third team, comprising warriors Aragorn (Mortensen), Gimli (John Rhys-Davies) and Legolas (Orlando Bloom). They could have sailed in from that old Viking dragon ship on the beach there, or perhaps they came with those Huns and their yurts off the Asian steppes, or possibly they fought with the Green Berets at Tan Phu, the Spartans at Thermopylae or Henry at Agincourt, but, no doubt about it, they are the soldiers and their business is war." He also spends considerable time criticizing things he finds poor in the movies, particularly hair. "I suppose if you're shooting three movies back to back on the other side of the world and it's one of the biggest gambles ever in the entertainment industry, a detail might have slipped your mind. In Jackson's case, that little detail was shampoo. He either couldn't afford it or he forgot all about it. The result is that you never saw so many greasy, tangled, thorny, wet, lusterless protein brambles as are on display in this movie. Viggo Mortensen, with a haircut that looks like a drowned swamp rat floating belly up in a bayou, leads the troop. A man named Viggo ought to do better than this."

Boston.com's quickie review offers witicisms..."We hear this is the series' "Empire Strikes Back". We also hear it's the only Lord everybody in Hollywood worships."

The New York Times analyzes and comes out in support of Director Jackson's decision to start the movie with no setup whatsoever. For the record, though I haven't seen the film yet I agree with that decision. Says the NYTimes, "Never has a film so strongly been a product of a director's respect for its source. Mr. Jackson uses all his talents in the service of that reverence, creating a rare perfect mating of filmmaker and material. Mr. Jackson's ploy in this beautifully considered epic is to give viewers the same feeling of confusion that his characters are experiencing. By doing this he simultaneously answers those who complained that too much of the previous "Rings" was about setup."