[Lord of Angmar]

I strongly disliked the second <I>Matrix</I> and have not bothered to see the third installment, but from what I have gathered of the trilogy as a whole it is not nearly as grand as the <I>Lord of the Rings</I> movies. The <I>Lord of the Rings</I> trilogy, for one thing, stands on its morals and ideologies (imbued originally and somewhat unconsciously by Professor Tolkien and translated pretty adeptly by Peter Jackson and Co.) without smacking you over the head with them. The <I>Matrix: Reloaded</I> seemed to me to try too hard to impress with multiple layers of philosophy and a dizzying array of erudite rhetorical questions and answers about the nature of reality, none of which really brought us any closer to some sort of philosophical conclusion. My own opinion, though it will prove nothing to <I>Matrix</I> fans and Tolkien critics, is that Peter Jacksons <I>The Lord of the Rings</I> trilogy was far better acted and carried out, and the awesome scope of Middle-earth and the War of the Ring cannot be rivaled by any computer-simulated alternate-reality world whose goings on seem more like an indecipherable, nauseum-inducing attempt at deep axiom than a coherent work of epic fiction.