Jackson's films are technologically quaint in comparison to much of the mainstream cinema output at the moment. Much of what you see is achieved by camera tricks, and they make the effort to construct those detailed costumes, weapons and sets that you see on screen. Where CGI and other SFX are used, they are done to craft what cannot be crafted by human hands, e.g. the green screen is used to create Gollum (and green screen is very old hat now).
I'd quite like to have seen a 1970s live action Lord of the Rings as it would be exactly like vintage Doctor Who, complete with terrible rubber masks and wobbly sets. But then I like that kind of thing (hey, I still like Blake's Seven, the wobbliest sci fi show of all time!), and I find it
very easy to lose myself in an SF film even if it is old and the sets are appalling. This is probably because
I am old
Just a couple of corrections and rants now...
John Carter might not have been the mass market success that Disney hoped, crossing over into the non-SF market, but it was lapped up by geeks. I'd have gone to see it myself if going to the cinema was not a virtual impossibility with family commitments to attend to.
Sneery British film reviewers amuse me with their ignorance. There are lots of films out there which are wonderful, and it is their problem if they cannot deal with advances in technology (and SFX are not even an issue in the majority of film making even today). Having a kid I am now learning to love Pixar and experiencing a renewed love of animation and so much of it is utterly beautiful (and animation is one of the UK's cultural strengths - our work is admired around the world). Whether that's the small screen delight of Abney & Teal or Daft Punk's Interstella 5555 or the textures of How To Train Your Dragon. It's lovely.
There are also many amazing stories you simply could not tell without SFX or animation, such as District 9, Watchmen and Spirited Away. Allan Massie does not know what he is missing - or perhaps he is content that way, bringing up the example of Downton Abbey, the second series of which had the most appalling and preposterous script I have seen since Crossroads was thankfully axed in 1988. At least Downton Abbey is not troubled by noisy aliens (it would be improved with zombies).
And to be brutal, cinema needed a ruddy good shake-up. The box office had become dominated by directors' 'me generation' navel-gazing about relationships, divorce and death. Tedious soap opera epics. Usually with Anne Bancroft and Meryl Streep crying or something. Cinemas were closing all over the UK because nobody could be bothered going out to see this stuff. Then it changed at the end of the 1990s with the 'CGI fest' (usually a sneery term used by old fashioned film reviewers for putting down SF or geek friendly films). These reviewers should toss the chip off their shoulders and go and see some SF blockbusters and if they don't like them, I could recommend any number of marvellous British and European films where the closest thing to SFX is the make up on Brenda Blethyn's face.
So many cinemas closed in the 80s and 90s due to the terrible stuff on offer, that we now have a very limited range of cinemas. For most, it's the multiplex. But there are indie screens in towns where there is a market for less mainstream films. We've got one about 15 mins from our house, tonight they are showing: Shadow Dancer; Tabu; Berberian Sound Studio; The Imposter; Lawless; anna Karenina and Homeward Bound. If you build it, they will come...
And anyway, it's not SFX that ruins films these days, it's terrible storytelling. And it also ruins much modern literary fiction. And TV. I can guarantee that this is what will have me walking away, and it's why Transformers and My Own Private Idaho both feature amongst my list of films I Do Not Like.
EDIT - and I've just enjoyed one example of something where the script is everything - the new series of The Thick Of it, and one of this Allan Massie character's "comic book stuff" films, namely The Hunger Games. Both were wonderful, and if he really does like: "Downton Abbey, because it has a literate script" then he is a fool, frankly (not least because the last series of Downton Abbey appeared to be written by a Y11 crammer who had to stuff as many random facts about WWI into his GCSE essay as possible to get maximum marks, and blow whether it's at all relevant).