After watching The Two Towers last night, I asked Joe what he thought of the difference between the first and second films. “I didn’t get so much out of it as the first film.” I agreed that it was the same for me, and that The Two Towers didn’t fill me with the sense of awe that The Fellowship of the Ring had. Joe replied: “I think we wore out our sense of aweness last night!”

The Two Towers has several different story lines going on: the journey from Edoras to Helms Deep and the battle there; the ringbearer’s journey; Saruman gathering his army and the Ents with Merry and Pippin. Joe summed it up: “ In the Fellowship you are following the characters, there’s one narrative, apart from the cutaway to Gandalf visiting Saruman, but that’s part of the same story. In The Two Towers you lose the momentum but gain the wider world view in that you learn more about what’s out there.”

I am moved to admiration of the visual effects: the explosion at Helm’s Deep and the bursting of the dam at Isengard in particular. And Gollum makes his first proper appearance. Using motion capture (recorded human action applied to animation) and movements acted out by Andy Serkis, also voiced by him, Gollum is digitally created. However, Joe remarked that, “The CGI Gollum is way better than what I’ve seen in films in the last five years; how he appears and interacts with his environment.”

We are about to see a lot more digital magic in Return of the King tonight. I think I will need a large bag of snacks to keep me going. It’s the extended version: 263 minutes long.