I've not read the books, but I gather from an interview with the screenwriter that they were afraid that the movie would look like it was trying to clone Harry Potter if it was about an 11-year-old English boy who learns about magic. (The great majority of the audience would very likely be people who had not read the books.) So, weirdly, their goal was to avoid looking like another typical genre film.
John Irving once said that there's no way of comparing a novel to a film based on it -- the constraints and needs of each medium make the two fundamentally incompatible. It's better to look at the film and ask whether it's a good film qua film, using the book as a prompt or starting place.
The thing that bothered a lot of people about the film of Sorcerer's Stone is that it attempted so much loyalty to the underlying novel that some of its potency as a piece of cinema was lost. By contrast, the films of LotR make some very interesting choices that deliberately deviate from the novels (e.g., making Aragorn a man filled with self-doubt, who does not want to accept the mantle of kingship; giving Arwen a role that is much more compelling than what she's allowed to do in the books; inventing a scene in which the Denethor-Boramir-Faramir triad is explicated with much more psychological realism than Tolkien envisioned) and almost cetainly make them better as cinema.
This is cold comfort if one of your favorite texts looks like it's being cheapened or torn to shreds. But I offer it for what it's worth.
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John Irving once said that there's no way of comparing a novel to a film based on it -- the constraints and needs of each medium make the two fundamentally incompatible. It's better to look at the film and ask whether it's a good film qua film, using the book as a prompt or starting place.
The thing that bothered a lot of people about the film of Sorcerer's Stone is that it attempted so much loyalty to the underlying novel that some of its potency as a piece of cinema was lost. By contrast, the films of LotR make some very interesting choices that deliberately deviate from the novels (e.g., making Aragorn a man filled with self-doubt, who does not want to accept the mantle of kingship; giving Arwen a role that is much more compelling than what she's allowed to do in the books; inventing a scene in which the Denethor-Boramir-Faramir triad is explicated with much more psychological realism than Tolkien envisioned) and almost cetainly make them better as cinema.
This is cold comfort if one of your favorite texts looks like it's being cheapened or torn to shreds. But I offer it for what it's worth.