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Middle-earth. After the death of Prince Boromir of Gondor and the disappearance of the wizard Gandalf, the Fellowship of the Ring - a group of nine convened to bring about the destruction of an evil 'ring of power' created by Sauron, the Dark Lord of Mordor - has split up. The hobbit Frodo Baggins, intent on taking the ring to Mordor to be destroyed, travels towards Sauron's realm with his loyal companion Sam, guided by Gollum, a creature who once possessed the ring and is now obsessed with getting it back. The human Aragorn, the elf Legolas and the dwarf Gimli enter the Kingdom of Rohan, searching for hobbits Merry and Pippin, who have been captured by the Uruk-hai, soldiers in the orc armies amassed by the turncoat wizard Saruman in the service of his alliance with Sauron.

King Theoden of Rohan, possessed by Saruman and badly advised by Saruman's ally Wormtongue, is in no position to resist Saruman's hordes, and Wormtongue ensures the death of Theoden's son and heir Theodred and the banishment of his nephew Eomer. Sam distrusts Gollum, but Frodo has sympathy with the former ringbearer. Aragorn's party encounters Eomer, who has slaughtered the Uruk-hai party who took Merry and Pippin, but the hobbits have escaped into the Forest of Fangorn, where they encounter Treebeard, an ent (giant sentient tree), who resists getting involved in the coming war. Gandalf reappears, transformed into the equal of Saruman, and exorcises Theoden, who decrees that his people should retreat to the keep of Helm's Deep to take a stand against the armies of Saruman. Though Aragorn disagrees with Theoden's tactics, he pledges himself to the cause of Rohan, surviving a battle in which he is feared dead; he is also torn between the love he feels for the elf Arwen and his attraction to Theoden's niece Eowyn. Frodo and Sam are captured by Faramir, brother of Boromir, who forces Frodo to lure Gollum into a trap, which embitters the former ringbearer against the hobbit, and decides to take ringbearer and ring to Gondor. Though an elven army joins with the forces of Rohan to defend Helm's Deep, the Uruk-hai lay siege and are only defeated when a human army, gathered by Gandalf, come to their aid. After an attack on Gondor by the Nazgul, a dragon in the service of Sauron, Faramir lets Frodo and the ring go to Mordor. As Frodo and Sam walk on, Gollum plots to betray the hobbits and take back his 'precious'.

Just as J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings was initially published as three separate novels with nearly-year-long intervals between volumes but is now generally seen as a single continuous narrative, the ultimate form of Peter Jackson's trilogy-in-progress is liable to be marathon daylong sessions (or, more likely, DVD box sets) that run the three parts together into one very long film. To that end, The Two Towers - taken from the tricky middle book, in which several sets of characters follow their own routes across Middle-earth to get to their starting places for the big finale - makes only a token attempt at getting newcomers up to speed. Generally speaking Jackson assumes you not only saw the first film but have total recall of it, picking up the pace a little for an episode that has few of the idyllic lulls of the establishing art. He has to cope with as many separate plot strands as vintage Altman, with the added handicap that they only come together in the next film.

Jackson and his collaborators continue their subtle work of adaptation, not so much updating Tolkien's characters as shifting emphasis to underplay his weaknesses. It's often remarked how few active female characters there are in the novel, but the film makes something of the implicit love triangle in which Viggo Mortensen's Aragorn is haunted by memories of his past with Liv Tyler's elf Arwen, but is drawn to Miranda Otto's determined princess Eowyn. Eowyn shows that she can wield a sword but is forced by duty not to be reinvented as a kick-ass warrior princess (she remains behind doors during the climactic battle at Helm's Deep).

The major alteration turns out to be felicitous: following a year overrun by giant mutant arachnids (Eight Legged Freaks, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, even Spider-Man), it makes sense to shift Shelob, the giant queen spider who threatens Frodo and Sam as they enter Mordor, to the first act of the next film. This allows for something close to a cliffhanger as Gollum, whose character arc is the spine of this segment, decides in the film's final moments that an unidentified 'she' should kill the two hobbits. This reshuffling means that the need to cut between different sets of characters doesn't extend to Jackson's choice of climax - the battle of Helm's Deep. This is staged as a satisfying bit of spectacle including intricate medieval-style siege warfare and Gandalf showing up like the Seventh Cavalry at the end of Stagecoach (1939).

Though lan McKellen's Gandalf returns from the dead, The Two Towers relies less on the presence of great British acting talent than did The Fellowship of the Ring. Bernard Hill's King Theoden is a tentative replacement for lan Holm's Bilbo, introduced as a fungus-covered zombie in the control of Brad Dourif's slimy traitor Wormtongue (not one of the subtler characterisations in book or film), and taking a view of the responsibilities of kingship different from the more adventurous princes of Gondor but just as disastrous. However, like Karl Urban's Eomer and David Wenham's Faramir, Theoden has to play catch-up to fit in with the mythic personalities established earlier, and the important politicking and warfare associated with these royal humans has less weight than the sometimes comic (sometimes camp) business between Aragorn, Orlando Bloom's elf Legolas (who seems set up as yet another love interest for Aragorn in some scenes) and John Rhys-Davies' blustering dwarf Gimli.

The debutant who steals the show is Gollum, barely glimpsed in the first film. A CGI creation, albeit with more than vocal input from British actor Andy Serkis, Gollum inhabits a live-action film as more than an equal of the unaugmented actors. He manages far better than Willem Dafoe in Spider-Man the trick of a schizoid talking to himself: the baser instincts of the cruel Gollum argue with the finer being he once was about the goodness of Frodo, until in a chilling culmination the two shattered halves of a personality agree with each other that further treachery is the best course. His non-human face has at least the expressive range of any other actor in the film, while the body seems to displace as much space as anyone who was actually on the set. Techies will gasp at the illusion when Gollum and the hobbits are splashing in the same stream; others will just accept the perfect mimesis and not realise what has been achieved - another step towards the moment when CGI becomes so invisible it ceases to be recognised even subconsciously as effects trickery.

Considered as a work-in-progress, the Lord of the Rings so far stands among the best adaptations of a major work of fantasy ever managed by the cinema. But it remains an adaptation rather than an original, in the manner of a John Huston who could take perfect books like The Maltese Falcon and make great films by shooting what was on the page rather than that of a Howard Hawks who saw in novels like The Big Sleep a foundation for even greater films. Jackson's films are exciting cinema, with a knack of finding the spot of landscape or performance or artefact equivalent to the Middle-earth of the novel and a knowing deployment of the styles of past movie masters ranging from Ray Harryhausen to Kurosawa. Aside from some gruesome humour with orcs reminiscent of Bad Taste and Braindead, Jackson's hitherto vital personality seems invisible here, as if the sacred task of filming Lord of the Rings involved channelling Tolkien rather than transforming the source material from one medium to another.

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