After reading it, I think the movies get a lot right and a little wrong.
I read this essay years ago (in The Tolkien Reader), and I couldn't disagree more. If the standard is being faithful to the spirit in which Tolkien wrote, I think the movies got a lot wrong and very little right. There's plenty of discussion of this elsewhere in the thread so I won't belabor it, but I'm surprised that anyone could read "On Fairy-Stories" and think that that spirit is what the films portray. The films are Hollywood action movies with a "fantasy" veneer; Tolkien's essay was talking about something very different.
I read this essay years ago (in The Tolkien Reader), and I couldn't disagree more. If the standard is being faithful to the spirit in which Tolkien wrote, I think the movies got a lot wrong and very little right. There's plenty of discussion of this elsewhere in the thread so I won't belabor it, but I'm surprised that anyone could read "On Fairy-Stories" and think that that spirit is what the films portray. The films are Hollywood action movies with a "fantasy" veneer; Tolkien's essay was talking about something very different.