Other than a distressing lack of quality hair care products, things are fine in Middle Earth. Good is still cute, bad is still monstro-evil, the landscapes still green, the Hobbits barefoot and dressed like Victorian squires, the warriors handsome, the milieu kitschy. And ignorant armies still clash by night.

Where are we now? What place is this? We are in myth. It's an artificial myth, invented only in the last century by a fussy Oxford don with too much time on his hands, but it's still convincing, gripping, whole and nourishing. Certainly of the fantasy film series currently in American theaters - I include "Harry Potter and the Secret Toity" and "Star Trek: Halitosis" - "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" is the best, and not by just a little.

It alone among them transcends. It works as story for the common narrative-starved fool, who needs heroic example and pulsating, vicariously energizing experiences of love and hate. You don't have to be one of those Hobbit-like geeks who've lost themselves in this world so intensely there is no other - though I hasten to add that there's nothing wrong with knowing more about Middle Earth than, er, Earth. You can - and this is the cool part - enjoy dual citizenship in the world where trees launch assaults on castles and the one where bills come due. Whichever citizenship you claim, you walk out and you think, that was a hell of a story.

What the director Peter Jackson brings to this second installment is exactly what he brought to the first, which is also what makes, come to think of it, a pretty good middle linebacker: power, speed and cunning. Jackson's not messing around. His commitment to this world is total. He's on a mission from Tolkien, and you either go along or you get trampled.

Of course, one can still track certain irritations. Elijah Wood, as the game little hero Hobbit, Frodo Baggins, still relies entirely too much on a single expression: It's that stricken look, as if he's just learned that not only didn't he get into Harvard but he has been banned from ever setting foot in Massachusetts. It's really not acting, it's face-making. Here's how you do it: First, sky-blue contacts. Then, in front of a mirror, make your mouth an open square. Flare your nostrils. Wrinkle that brow. Really, really, squish it up good. Open your eyes to about f/1. Tighten your throat. Suck in your cheeks. There, you are now indistinguishable from the bearer of the One True Ring.

Other shortcomings? The Ents. Ents, not ants. An Ent is a big tree. Or, rather, it is a majestic sentinel of the forest, meant to guard all that is green and good about the world, mainly other trees. But of the brilliant digitized illusions conjured by the film, most of them wondrous and palpable at the same time, the Ents, it must be said, are kind of a disappointment. I mean, come on: They're just trees. Most people will think of the trees that were hornswoggled into throwing apples by the Scarecrow in "The Wizard of Oz"; these guys are taller and tougher and they appear to have no apples, but they still walk like the kind of tragic human specimens that are over seven feet tall but not coordinated enough for basketball. In other words, they aren't Yao Ming, they are Manute Bol. Particularly when they march, they just look silly, and when they go to war, their attack is somehow the least convincing, a letdown in a story whose strength is that it drags us through the charnel house of medieval warfare.

And finally, the hair. I suppose if you're shooting three movies back to back on the other side of the world and it's one of the biggest gambles ever in the entertainment industry, a detail might have slipped your mind. In Jackson's case, that little detail was shampoo. He either couldn't afford it or he forgot all about it. The result is that you never saw so many greasy, tangled, thorny, wet, lusterless protein brambles as are on display in this movie. Viggo Mortensen, with a haircut that looks like a drowned swamp rat floating belly up in a bayou, leads the troop. A man named Viggo ought to do better than this.

Tell me you don't want plot. You don't, do you? You do. Ach. Well, the movie takes off directly from where the last one left us, and basically three plot strains are followed, each strain a journey across Middle Earth. The team whose formation was the essence of the first film is now broken up, and we watch as three - two teams of two Hobbits, and one team of three warriors - journey across the world, each on a mission, while various larger forces gather to unleash destruction.

The gathering storm is the unification of the dark lord Sauron (still unseen, but whose menace is felt everywhere - and in No. 3, Jackson had better deliver, but good) with the lesser monster Saruman the White (Christopher Lee, on leave from the disappointing "Star Wars" second gen). It's Saruman who's unleashed his legions of grown-from-mud warriors called Uruk-hai - they look like a DNA combo of WWE heavyweights and large, grumpy pigs - upon some other Middle Earth townships and shires, namely Rohan. (Gee, do you think I'm copying this from some Web site?)

Team A of Hobbits consists of Frodo (Wood) and Sam (Sean Astin). Frodo has the One Ring, and his job is to get across Middle Earth and penetrate the topless towers of Mordor and there dump the ring into a volcano to destroy it and restore harmony to the world. But he must do this without wearing the ring, which would corrupt his character.

Team B in the Hobbit League is Merry (Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd), who are going somewhere that no Web site seems to know. They are the ones who get caught up by the Ents, and when war breaks out, it is they who leverage the Ents into a counterattack against one of the towers.

Because I have no imagination for little critters, I preferred the third team, comprising warriors Aragorn (Mortensen), Gimli (John Rhys-Davies) and Legolas (Orlando Bloom). They could have sailed in from that old Viking dragon ship on the beach there, or perhaps they came with those Huns and their yurts off the Asian steppes, or possibly they fought with the Green Berets at Tan Phu, the Spartans at Thermopylae or Henry at Agincourt, but, no doubt about it, they are the soldiers and their business is war.

And that's really the business of "The Two Towers" and the business of director Jackson. In the end it's a medieval battle rhapsody and you can pretend the Uruk-hai are demons from the mud of Hell or Flemish mercenaries from beyond Hanover in the year 1642, and it really makes no difference at all. It's men in mud and rain, at a castle keep, in armor with spears and swords, and it's a long, long day's dying.

Jackson's imagination is most vividly provoked by the extreme nature of Bronze Age battle, for the last hour of "The Two Towers" is pure combat and it's mind-blowing. The scene is Helm's Deep, a castle moored against a rock escarpment that takes the full force of the Uruk-hai attack, while our three human heroes and the Rohanites stand fast. Some won't be able to watch the hackings and gougings, and some (e.g., moi) won't be able to look away.

But underneath it all is the same issue that defined Tolkien's life, the battle between Western democracy and monsters who wanted to destroy it. Read into it what you want, or read nothing into it, but it's really the oldest story of all. It's the one about a band of free men on a hilltop with nothing to get them through the night but their belief in themselves and their cause and the long steel they carry in their scabbards.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS (PG-13, 179 minutes) - Contains intense battle sequences, perhaps too intense for youngsters. It opens at midnight at several theaters, and later in the day at others.