The Lord of the Rings movies have me worried.

I'm not worried that Hollywood is about to counter the success of the trilogy by pumping out a murky river of uninspired Sword and Sorcery knock-offs, or worried that all post-production work is going to be sent to New Zealand from now on, putting most of my friends out of work, or even worried whether or not Frodo will destroy that darned ring in a spectacular tour-de-force conclusion next Christmas. No, I'm worried that at some point in recent history I've become a totally stereotypical "MTV generation" attention deficited moron.

I like to think that I'm somewhat intellectual, but it has been an unending challenge for me to keep straight which character is which, who's the rightful king of what, who hails from which kingdom, how each race relates to each other, and just how many damn hobbits there are on this quest anyway. It probably doesn't help that each film strains the outermost limits of my attention span, not to mention the circulation in my buttocks.

You can look anywhere on the Internet for a glowing review of The Two Towers. Literally anywhere. Like, you can go to weatherchannel.com and read, "Today's forecast for Pittsburgh shows a chance of snow, high 29, low 27, and The Two Towers is a stupendous visual achievement; a great movie fantasy which stands on its own as a visionary thriller."

That's why I'm not going to gush about how Peter Jackson is burying the rest of the movie industry under his awesome awesomeness. I'm going to explore the other side a little. I'm going to tell you what I think has gone wrong. Please hold your public stoning until the end.

Never having read any Middle Earth books outside of The Hobbit in ninth grade English class, I'm hitting this trilogy more or less as an outsider. The fantasy genre has never been my bag, regardless of the fact that it's somehow always lumped in with sci-fi, which my bag floweth over with. I've never been able to make the logical connection that justifies the "sci-fi/fantasy" combo-genre sharing the same shelf at the video store. I mean, what does Conan the Barbarian have at all in common with Total Recall? Okay, bad example, but you get my point.

From what I know without actually doing any research, there was this guy named J.R.R. Tolkien (who had two middle initials, just in case he got a hole in one) who wrote a whole bunch of highly original books about "Dungeons and Dragons" type stuff in the '40s or so. Ever since then, everybody and their Uncle Chaz has stolen everything that he's written and rehashed it over and over again until every last bit of it is a creaking cliché. Like Dungeons and Dragons.

Much like that bastard Shakespeare, Tolkien has a penchant for giving all of his characters basically the same names, to confuse anyone who doesn't own a sixty-sided die.

For example, the giant floating source-of-all-evil eyeball thing that J.K. Rowling stole "Voldemort" from is named "Sauron," while the wicked Pantene wizard is named "Saruman." Of course, because everyone in the movie is speaking in a cheap Middle Earth accent, they both sound exactly the same to the layperson, ie. me.

Then there's "Arwen" and "Eowyn." Their names aren't exactly the same, but when you put them together like that, don't they sound like they're supposed to be partners? Like a Vegas magic act or a pair of cartoon magpies? Luckily for me, however, one of these women was played by Liv Tyler (best known for her starring role in Armageddon) making it possible for me to distinguish between them.

I was not so lucky with the men, however, and this is perhaps the part that worries me the most. The whole time that I was watching The Fellowship of the Ring, I didn't realize that Aragorn and Boromir were two different guys. I mean, they both were "men" rather than the easily distinguishable smaller races, or "freaks." They were both basic fantasy genre white guys with long greasy hair, stubble, and swords. One was a king, one was supposed to be the king. Imagine how confused I was to suddenly find the "guy" watching his own funeral at the end of the first movie.

Then, for some unknown reason that can only be explained through a further attempt to befuddle me, the dwarf and the scary tree man in The Two Towers are both played by the same guy, namely "The Pavarotti Dude from Sliders." WHY?! There are so many actors out there who weren't already in the movie. Why did Peter Jackson decide to have the same guy use the same juicy-rolling-Rs voice on two characters in the same film? They should have given the tree guy voice duties to Leonard Nimoy, so that he could have repented for his classic travesty "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins."

For those of us who don't already know The Lord of the Rings by heart, I think a little bit more exposition may have been in order in parts of these films. For example, there was a part about a third into The Two Towers where a new town was introduced, and with it about seventeen new characters simultaneously. From Killer-Klown-King, to Professor-Snape-Guy, to Guy-Who-Is-Dying, to Guy-Who-Is-Dying's-Brother, to That-Chick-Who-Dark-Hair-Guy-is-Making-Eyes-All-Over-Even-Though-He's-Supposed-to-be-in-Love-with-Liv-Tyler, I just totally got lost. But apparently I was the only one, as nobody else in the theater started reviewing their Cliffs Notes.

And then there's the fact that no main character dies, no matter what. Sure Gandalf "dies" in the first movie, but that wasn't fooling anybody. And then there's That-Guy-Who-Dies-at-the-End-of-the-First-Movie. Okay, he dies too. But since then, no matter what, nobody goes to that great hobbit hole in the sky, no matter how many monsters, orcs, or uber-orcs they have to fight.

I mean, come on Tolkien, you want us to believe even the sluggish, dumpy little dwarf can toss around glib one liners while fighting off thirty crazed WWE wannabes without so much as getting a scratch? And then, in a blaze of glory, Dark-Hair and Dwarf bust out of a somehow unnoticed door slightly to the right of the one that the entire army of the damned has been barraging for the past act, to leap into a horde of ten thousand nightmare beefpile soldiers, not to meet tear-jerking heroic death, but to, in fact, bloodily dispatch said ten thousand soldiers nearly single handedly. WHAT?! That's like something out of a Voyager episode!

"Don't worry Captain, I'll go outside and fix the broken airlock."
"But you don't have a spacesuit!"
"Not to worry, I'm Tom Paris^tm."
"Oh right, carry on then."

And what's the deal with elves? Whenever you see an elf, they fall into one of two completely unrelated categories:

• Some elves, such as the ones in Lord of the Rings, are elegant, graceful, strong, smart, savvy, and basically everything that you want out of a potential sex partner. A perfect example of this kind of elf is dreamy Orlando Bloom's "Legolas" taken from the Latin, meaning "girl made of interlocking bricks."

• On the flip side, there's the "Santa's Elves" variety of elves. These elves are invariably badly dressed, short, bucktoothed, pointed eared, jingle-bell clad, clumsy little bearded oafs who delight in being bossed around by a fat old man, or delight in bossing around Ernest P. Worrell. This type of elf is typified by Dudley Moore's "Patch" in Santa Claus: The Movie, the character voted "least likely to have anything anyone has ever wanted in a potential sex partner."

All this is not to say that the Lord of the Rings movies aren't good. Of course they are. You'd be hard pressed to find anything that's come out in wide release in recent years that's anywhere close to the quality of these pictures. They're supremely well done, well acted, beautiful films, and the special effects are as close to perfect as they're going to get until some new technology comes along that altogether replaces motion pictures as we know them. Gollum alone takes every CG effect slapped in a movie since Jurassic Park and makes them look like paper cut outs wiggled on a string in front of a light bulb.

All I'm saying is, after ninety minutes of The Hot Chick, I left the theatre happy and healthy with a smile on my face, and after three hours of The Two Towers, I left the theatre puzzled, cramped, and slightly annoyed.

And this worries me a great deal.