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I would not say it was a disappointment - I am a big fan of the film trilogy as a whole - but it definitely lost something going from paper to film reel. It lost some of that sense of 'enchantment' that has been so fervently discussed in the 'Canonicity' thread.
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My feelings entirely Son of Númenor (welcome to the Downs, by the way
). And I think that Tolkien himself put it very well in his essay 'On Fairy-Stories':
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However good in themselves, illustrations do little good to fairy-stories. The radical distinction between all art (including drama) that offers a visible presentation and true literature is that it imposes one visible form. Literature works from mind to mind and is thus more progenitive.
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When we read the books, we are free (subject to the descriptions given) to imagine the characters, places and events portrayed ourselves. We create the vision. And, as the discussion above concerning Galadriel illustrates, every reader creates their own personal vision. But, in any transformation of literature to a visual medium, the vision is created for us. And it seems to me that this restriction of our imagination is bound to lessen the "magic" (or should I say "ensorcelment"
) that we feel. It is not our own vision that we are witnessing, but someone else's.
But, even if we were to film the books ourselves with unlimited resources so that it matched our own visualisation in every respect (and the films certainly lived up to my own visualisation in very many respects), I am still not sure that the feeling would be the same when we watched it back. And that, I think, is because the "enchantment" arises when we use our imaginations as we read (the "progenitive" process as Tolkien put it). So the visualisation of the books can never hold the same enchantment for us as the books themselves.