YOU can add The Two Towers to The Godfather Part II and the 1970 Leeds-Chelsea Cup Final replay as sequels that were better, grimmer and gorier than the original.

Except that this isn't strictly a sequel to Fellowship Of The Ring but episode two of the apocalyptic, magisterial, morally complex Tolkien trilogy, directed with an even more bravura display of the cinema arts by Peter Jackson.

The certificate has moved upwards from a PG to a 12A, signifying a turn for the even darker in the grim, grinding ancient hell of Middle-Earth, and there can be no arguing with that new age limit.

Jackson picks up the terrifying tale of dreadful deeds and gothic gore with hobbit Frodo Baggins (bug-eyed Elijah Wood) and his roly-poly West Country friend Sam (Sean Astin) trudging ever onwards, under the burden of destiny on their quest to reach Mordor with the cursed ring.

They have been joined on a journey even more traumatic and interminable than an M25 commute by the fork-tongued Gollum (half Andy Serkis, half computer-generated images, wholly extraordinary cinema magic).

This skin-and-bone creature is not dissimilar to Harry Potter's elf, Dobby, but is a far more adult tortured being, subservient yet seething. In permanent mental and physical pain after murdering his cousin to acquire the ring, he slithers like a snake, has the voice of a 60-a-day habit and can be trusted about as much as Peter Foster.

Like Daniel Radcliffe's Harry in the Potter movies, Wood's young hero Frodo is the least satisfying element of the Ring cycle so far. His perplexed pastoral passages act like a sleeping policeman, slowing down the three-hour traffic upon Jackson's New Zealand canvas.

His time will come - he has three more hours to save Middle-Earth next year - and The Two Towers has plenty more on which to feast the eye and charge the soul.

The three musketeers of the piece are Aragorn (sternly virile Viggo Mortensen), whizkid elf archer Legolas (flaxen Orlando Bloom, an ever so slightly camp twist on Errol Flynn) and heavy-bearded, mini-fighting-machine Jock dwarf Gimli (John Rhys Davies, the butt of every size gag imaginable in a movie that makes the most of its few opportunities for comic relief).

Their mission is to help the Rohan kingdom, under relentless siege from the armies of the evil wizard Saruman (Christopher Lee, effortlessly out-starring all around him with no recourse to Hammer hamming).

Battle will be joined, eventually, by the slow-talking, slow-walking, slow-thinking Treebeard and his fellow tree shepherds - another comic release valve but with an ecological axe to grind too - once cajoled by their hobbit captives Merry and Pippin in their enchanted forest.

Although the Two Towers title has led inevitably to links with the events of 9/11, the battle scenes are the stuff of the last century, the sodden fields and cannon-fodder mass slaughter of the First World War, and of the ethnic cleansing policies of Hitler's Nazis and the Baltic states.

Jackson does not labour this point but the mythological Middle-Earth is a place in turmoil, ripping itself apart, its lands scarred and angry as a rash; its peoples mere pawns in a bigger chess game.

The adrenaline and bone-crunching exhilaration yet mortal fear of combat is brilliantly realised by Jackson, particularly in the climactic Helm's Deep battle: the pinnacle of three titanic, intense hours of cinematic wonder in the tradition of Metropolis and Ben Hur, Star Wars and The Magnificent Seven.

One quibble: magnificent timeless cinema as it is, it is all a little too Boy's Own. Where are the action women?

Updated: 09:43 Friday, December 20, 2002