DARKER, faster and more violent than the magnificent first installment of Peter Jackson's screen realization of "The Lord of the Rings," "The Two Towers" is at least its equal in visual and special effects magic.
No one has ever made better, more seamlessly natural-looking use of computer-generated imagery - starting with an amazing opening sequence depicting Gandalf's "death."

And the sequel's battle scenes - especially the climactic assault on the Helm's Deep fortress by the armies of darkness - easily put those of the "Star Wars" series to shame.

The world Jackson has created matches to an extraordinary degree that described by Tolkien in the novels.

But this fidelity - broken only by the emphasis on the female elves played by Cate Blanchett and Liv Tyler, and the turning of Faramir of Gondor (David Wenham) into a quasi-villain - is also at the root of the film's occasional stiffness.

Like the first movie, "The Two Towers" is earnest almost to the point of hilarity. There are many, many moments when the heroes arrive somewhere they've never been before, and one of them says portentously, "This is the Valley of Gorgonzola" or something like that, before a companion looks off in another direction and says something on the order of, "I sense evil here."

And unless you know the book well, you may need a guidebook to identify places and characters like Isengard and Sauron (see yesterday's Post). It doesn't help the possible confusion that some characters inexplicably drop in and out of "Elvish" (with subtitles in English).

At the beginning of "The Two Towers," the Fellowship of the Ring has been split into three groups. Frodo (Elijah Wood) and Sam (Sean Astin) are still making their way to Mordor to destroy the magical One Ring (which hangs increasingly heavily around Frodo's neck).

Meanwhile (the film is a succession of "meanwhiles"), human warrior Aragorn (Viggo Mortenson), Gimli the dwarf (John Rhys-Davies) and the blond elf Legolas (Orlando Bloom) are making their way over the mountains in pursuit of the band of Uruk-hai super-Orcs that have captured Frodo's hobbit friends (Group No. 3) Merry (Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd).

While the trio led by Aragorn enter the sad kingdom of Rohan, where King Theoden (Bernard Hill from "Titanic") has been bewitched by his councilor Wormtongue (Brad Dourif), Frodo and Sam capture Gollum, the strange creature that has been following them. Though Sam doesn't trust Gollum at all, they get him to act as their guide to Mordor.

In many ways, Gollum is the most fascinating thing about "The Two Towers" both visually (he's partially computer-generated) and as a character.

The filmmakers have actually made him more compelling here than in the book, fleshing out the internal conflict between his ring-inspired evil and his vestigial good self.

It's a shame the City of Rohan looks like a tiny hamlet. And there's something Monty Pythonesque in the way Princess Eowyn's (Miranda Otto) royalness is conveyed by her being the only person in Rohan with clean hair.

Some have seen parallels with "the war on terror," and the franchise does seem to have captured something of the spirit of the age with its coalition-building, berobed bad-guys, etc.

But "Towers" is - even more explicitly than the novel or the first episode - an attack on the industrialization Tolkien thought was destroying the spirit of pre-war rural England. In any case, it's an amazing feat of imagination.