"The Two Towers," the second installment of Peter Jackson's three-film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings," is a magisterial caesura. That may be an odd thing to say about a movie that climaxes with one of the most amazing epic battle sequences ever put on film, a movie that, like its predecessor, conjures up new worlds seemingly every time you blink your eyes, a film that keeps dropping wonders into your lap like precious gifts casually given.

With "The Two Towers" it seems very clear that we are in the midst of one of the great achievements in fantasy filmmaking and in epic filmmaking. Pauline Kael once said that directors die on movies of this magnitude and turn into technicians. Miraculously, Peter Jackson hasn't died. The filmmaker is alive and well alongside the tactician he must have had to become to pull off the feat of turning Tolkien's books into movies. For all the lushness and wonder on the screen in the two installments we have seen of "The Lord of the Rings," there are also tremendous reserves of discipline.


You could hardly blame Jackson if he fell in love with the sets created by production designer Grant Major and let Andrew Lesnie's camera dote on them. But the strictness of both Jackson's pacing and D. Michael Horton's editing tells you that you are in the hands of people who realize that wondrous effects are only good to the extent that they advance narrative and deepen emotion. Jackson has set the standard against which all other special-effects movies must be measured, not just because what we see here is so spectacular but because Jackson never allows the effects to become the movie's raison d'être.

That discipline is especially important in "The Two Towers" because the film is the difficult middle child of the trilogy, without either the cumulative storytelling power or emotional surge of "The Fellowship of the Ring." It's a fractured tale that cuts between the temporarily broken band of the fellowship as they meet separate challenges on their way to destroy the evil power of the Dark Lord Sauron. Frodo (Elijah Wood, whose performance is both intensely physical and vibrating with a sense of spiritual terror) and his faithful companion Sam Gamgee (Sean Astin, whose doughy cheeks bring the movie a grounded touch of the ordinary and familiar) are making their way to Mordor to dispose of the Ring of Power, which will destroy the dark forces.



Separated from these two, Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen, whose performance brings the character close to being one of the movies' great romantic heroes), the elf Legolas (Orlando Bloom, with his angelic pixie looks), and the dwarf warrior Gimli (John Rhys-Davies, whose boisterous aggression and appetites make him deeply funny) are on the trail of hobbits Merry (Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd), who have fallen into the hands of the Orcs. Hanging around the edges of the story are Gandalf (Ian McKellen), who has been transformed into an even more powerful wizard, and his dark doppelgänger Saruman (Christopher Lee, who, with a stick-thin build that seems as if it were being eaten away by sheer corruption, looks like Rasputin reincarnated as an evil saint).

And there are new characters: Théoden, the King of Rohan (Bernard Hill), whose kingdom is threatened by Saruman's army of Orcs and who has fallen under the spell of one of the dark wizard's minions, Gríma (Brad Dourif -- with his black stringy hair and Dwight Frye grin, he looks completely at home in the world of Tolkien). There is also Théoden's niece Éowyn (the Australian actress Miranda Otto, who also looks at home in Tolkien but for reasons having to do more with enchantment than evil), who begins falling in love with Aragorn -- whose own lady love, Arwen (Liv Tyler), may be sailing to the Undying Lands of the west with the rest of the elves to escape the coming wrath of Sauron.

These films have been impeccably cast. I don't know why, playing a wizard, McKellen should seem more human and be more likable than he has ever been on-screen. It can't be just the bulbous fake nose that gives him a touch of fleshiness. It's that he plays Gandalf with a mischievous sagacity that, in the dramatic scenes, translates into real authority. And as in the first film, we continue to experience the terrors of the heroes' quest through the blue of Elijah Wood's wide eyes. Wood manages the very difficult feat of playing a good character without becoming sappy or dear. When the ring starts to weigh him down (literally) we fear for Frodo because we are confronted with the real possibility that this good hobbit will go bad.