It makes for a good read, if nothing else.
That is ultimately what makes Jackson’s adaptation work. It takes the abstract themes of the book and makes them concrete. Corruption is no longer something to be imagined—it walks and crawls and hisses. Destiny is not a vague theological concept—it is embodied in the weary face of a king-in-waiting and the ruin of a king who waited too long. The war for Middle-earth is not an approaching storm—You watch the torrent fall upon Rohan in the rain, mud, and despair of Helm’s Deep.
Jackson sacrifices a little of Tolkien’s structure in exchange for emotional immediacy.
And nothing I just wrote will change the minds of people who hate it for precisely this reason.
I don’t hate THE TWO TOWERS. In fact, it was the first Tolkien book of which I ever read a part; it was Boromir’s brave death scene that captivated me from the start and made me beg my mother to take me to the library so I could check out the whole trilogy and let me start reading it from the beginning.
But it is the weakest of the three movies. Denethor is awful and I hate what they did to Faramir, who was my favorite character in the books. The suicidal cavalry charge against the orc archers behind a wall is indefensibly stupid; it’s not being a sperg to object to actions that are so retarded that they defy the suspension of disbelief required to enjoy a movie.
And yet, Peter Jackson did accomplish what was previously, and now is again, completely impossible. For which we should be grateful, even though we are duty-bound to put him on trial for what he did to THE HOBBIT.