Pretend for a second, if you will, that you escaped the womb before Francis Ford Coppola dropped “The Godather Part II,” an improvement on “Part I.”

Pretend that you weren’t still in Huggies when the superior “Empire Strikes Back” — that champion of sequels — was released. That you’ve experienced sequels firsthand long before they became the mindless-trash-hurried-together-by-greedy-studios-capitalizing-on-proven-products that they are today.

Then you won’t be surprised when “The Two Towers,” a sequel in a day and age when the term carries such negative baggage, is the best picture you’ve seen in years. Maybe ever.

Funny thing is, “The Two Towers” wasn’t even intended to be a sequel — even as a book — and it shows. It’s the middle section of a masterful novel that was broken into three parts by an editor wary of the world’s collectively dissipating attention span (and unwary of the world’s eventual distaste for sequels).

Therefore, it never stops to remind you what happened last time, violating the first unwritten law of the crappy sequel. There’s no “In the last episode of ‘The Lord of the Rings…”‘ It introduces dozens of new characters at breakneck speed, never worrying that you might forget who the dozens you met in the last picture are.

And it doesn’t care that between films you forgot the difference between Sauron and Saruman. And it’s still better than any sequel — “Godfather II” and “Empire” included — we’ve ever seen.

Without a doubt, “Towers” is a far more ambitious venture than its predecessor, “Fellowship,” whereas most sequels are half-assed scars on their respected franchises. As director Peter Jackson puts it, “Fellowship” was one straight-forward story and his most difficult decisions in editing were simply what parts to cut from the book.

“Towers” wasn’t as cut and dry, and if Jackson deserved an Oscar nomination for “Rings” (and he did), then “Towers” should score him a win.

As you’ll remember, we find our fellowship of nine heroes broken into splinter groups: Frodo and Sam on their way to Mount Doom; Merry and Pippin captured by Orcs; Gimli, Aragorn, and Legolas off to rescue them; Boromir and Gandalf having fallen in battle. Jackson spent the last year in post-production deciding which stories were deserving of more screen time and searching for a way to cut among them without losing his audience.

On top of this, Jackson further damns himself by offering potentially confusing flashback and dream sequences. He ignores our hero, Frodo, for intervals of often longer than half an hour. He turns established sidekicks into heroes, and heroes into sidekicks.

And he puts a computer-generated character, Gollum, into the thick of things — something you’d think Jar Jar Binks taught us never to attempt again.

The result is a far cry from the disheveled mess you might expect — it’s damn near flawless. Jackson breaks every sequel rule in the book and in doing so proves the book should be thrown out the window.

He masterfully intertwines three important stories and sprinkles it with peripheral developments, climaxing in one drawn-out, monstrous action sequence (the Battle of Helm’s Deep) that makes the landmark fights of “Attack of the Clones,” “Braveheart,” and “Saving Private Ryan” look paltry in comparison.

He holds faith in the intelligence of an audience that studios have assumed to be dimwitted and impatient. Only the film’s gargantuan box office take will prove him right. God bless that little man.

Exactly how good is “The Two Towers?” In scope, it’s far larger and more impressive than “Fellowship.” We have a familiarity with these characters already, so their development (which may have slowed the first film) can be sidestepped for blood-curdling action on massive scales.

In the long run, “Towers” probably won’t match the first film’s Oscar tally (competition looks stronger this year and “Fellowships'” failure to win major awards in 2002 may turn voters off), but it will surely raise a very interesting question over the next month: Can and should a computer generated character be nominated for a performance?

Andy Serkis (“Clueless”) puts on a mind-bogglingly warped show as Gollum, the previous keeper of the series’ One Ring (he made a brief appearance in the last film).

Jackson went out of his way to recreate Serkis’ movements and actually animated Gollum over video of Serkis performing as if he were the creature, right down to nailing minute facial tics.

The most repeated canned quote you’ll hear throughout his campaign (Serkis’ name is already on New Line’s “For Your Consideration” ads, thus starting the “campaign”) is a rather valid one from Jackson. He compares Serkis’ performance to that of the similarly disfigured John Hurt in “The Elephant Man.” His face completely obscured by prosthetics, you never see Hurt. Hurt gained a nomination. So should Serkis.