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.