I pretty much agree with that. Somehow they got 'locked in' to cultural consciousness, which is cool in some ways, but deleterious in others IMO.

It's different for me though, since I'm a middle-aged guy who's been seeing various adaptations of The Hobbit & LotR for years, even if it's just fan-art stuff. Frodo does not necessarily look like Elijah Wood. Frodo looks like Frodo!

Another problem I had with the films (despite their quality) is that there were a few too many cheesy moments for me. For example when the cave troll speared Frodo, it was as if time stopped. Everyone in the party telepathically "knew," and swiveled their heads to look over in shock & horror, and of course the orcs all started moving in slow motion. Just show the damn event and follow-up with the aftermath, please. This isn't The Matrix, featuring "bullet-time," lol.

Agreed. What he did with The Hobbit in particular was utter nonsense. He made a whimsy fairy tale into Lord of The Rings "Reloaded" or something.

his orks look like fucking zombies

LOL, I never thought of that, but I guess its true.

to me they are completely void of the fairytale-like magic the books have.

I tend to agree with that. So many of these Hollywood movies are utterly caught up with visuals & sound, building tension and manipulating audience reaction. Me, I'd love to see a BBC-made series adaptation if a budget could be found. One that could pay a little more attention to details and cover more of the text, such as including the Bombadil section, a proper return to Hobbiton, and the true coverage of Saruman's demise.

Another annoying thing for me is that some critical sections of the movie were shot but not included in the regular film, so you could only see these in the extended versions. For example, somewhere in the search below you can find:

• the FULL council of Elrond scene, in which Gandalf speaks the ring's inscription, the sky turns black, and even the elves quake in fear
• Saruman and Wormtongue meet their doom, even if it's not accurate to the books
• the amazing/hilarious appearance of the "Mouth of Sauron" before the final battle
• hmm, am I missing anything..?

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=lotr+extra+scenes

That said, I'm still kind of impressed by the movies given that Jackson and his little team were seemingly writing the adaptation on the fly, often finishing pages literally hours before they were shot. Really poor move by the studio IMO, which later wound up turning The Hobbit in to a total mess. Not that they likely cared due to money being their bottom line.

Btw, I do consider the extended 'making of LotR' movies to be significantly better films than LotR itself.