The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson recently revealed that his favorite entry in the trilogy is the second installment, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. This is a surprising choice to many fans, and Jackson is wrong if he thinks that’s the best movie out of the three. In fact, the case for either of the other movies is much stronger. The Two Towers has its memorable moments, but all the real heart and thrills in Middle-earth are found in The Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King. It sounds like Jackson might even agree if he had re-watched the movies more recently.
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In fairness, Jackson doesn’t seem to be planting his feet on this statement. He was asked to choose a favorite in an interview with Letterboxd, and after he named The Two Towers, he quickly added, “But if I see them again I might have a totally different one.” Jackson told the site that he hasn’t really sat down to watch the trilogy since its release, explaining, “I can’t watch my own films. I just, I mean, one day… I sort of enjoy it more as more time goes by, so one day I’ll watch them again.”
The Lord of the Rings is a pretty clearly plotted trilogy, with act breaks and overlapping arcs and all the structure that makes a story work. It’s common knowledge that the middle of a trilogy is often the least exciting part — authors and readers sometimes refer to this phenomenon as the “second book slump.” There are exceptions, of course — think Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back — but Jackson’s Two Towers is not typically held up as one of them.
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It’s worth noting that J.R.R. Tolkien did not consider The Lord of the Rings to be a trilogy, but one continuous novel. He broke it up into parts for practical publishing reasons, but it was often sold as a set or one large volume. In a way, Jackson may think of the story the same way, since he planned and filmed his entire trilogy all at once, with no breaks between movies. There are some very exciting moments in this second part of the story — they just can’t compete with the excitement of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring or the action of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.
To be transparent, my personal favorite movie to re-watch in the trilogy is Return of the King, but I think I can make a convincing case for either part one or two being better than The Two Towers.
The Fellowship of the Ring
Fellowship is a lot of fans’ favorite, and for good reason. It has a huge advantage here just by being the first because it was the first time fans saw Middle-earth on screen — the first time they saw how hobbits, elves, and dwarves would be depicted, how magic would look, the quality of the sets and special effects, and so on. In many ways, the first movie was like a sales pitch to hook fans in for two more installments, and it was incredibly successful.
Of course, the slow build from an idyllic life in the Shire to a world-saving adventure is also what makes this one an easy choice. Viewers aren’t expected to remember anything, whether they’ve watched the trilogy recently or not. They can tag along with Frodo from his embarrassing uncle’s birthday party to an Uruk-hai ambush without missing a step. Even though it ends on a cliffhanger, the movie also leaves you with a sense of excitement and infinite possibility, so that even if you aren’t binge-watching the whole trilogy, you feel satisfied.
Perhaps most importantly, Fellowship introduces all the main characters and establishes their relationships with each other. For many fans, once you know the story, a re-watch is all about observing character arcs more closely, and these arcs all start here. If you’re in it for the ensemble, this is basically all you get — the Fellowship is split into three groups for all of The Two Towers, and after Merry and Pippin reunite briefly with Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli in Return of the King, they scatter even further from each other. The reunion at the very end is triumphant, but they don’t spend much time together at all after Fellowship.
The Return of the King
As you might expect, the third installment of the trilogy is practically all climax and pay-off with non-stop action and some of the best special effects of the whole production. That could have been dangerous — look what happened to The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies — but Jackson threaded this needle expertly in Return of the King. There’s still lots of story to tell, but the movie does presume that you’ve seen the two that came before it, and retained everything from them.
That is admittedly a high bar for entry, which is why I think Fellowship is a perfectly valid favorite to choose. However, we all know that there are many, many people who have re-watched the trilogy so many times that they practically have it memorized, and for us, skipping straight to Return of the King on a lazy Sunday afternoon is like a superpower. We can minimize our time watching Gollum crawl around eating worms and get straight to the peaks of the story — the forging of Anduril, Eowyn’s defeat of the Witch King of Angmar, Sam carrying Frodo up a molten hill, and so on.
In the same way that Fellowship gives you all the foundational character moments you want, Return of the King gives you a chance to look back at how far your heroes have come. Lines like “What about side by side with a friend?” and “My friends, you bow to no one” are great enough on their own, but with the momentum of three movies behind them they hit like a war oliphant every single time.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy is streaming now on Max — both the theatrical cuts and the extended editions. The latest entry in the franchise, The War of the Rohirrim, is still playing in many theaters but is now available to rent or purchase digitally at home as well. Tolkien’s books are available now in print, digital, and audiobook formats.
