The thing is, movies are not houses. Houses have, yes, girders and foundations and other vital things beyond windows; but movies themselves are windows. Whatever the technology that produces them, whatever the cinematic legacy that any given work builds upon— in the end, all that matters is up there on the screen. All that matters is whether those sights and sounds work in service of the tale; there is no hidden dry rot, no badly-placed support beams that would allow an expert eye to think “Sure it all looks solid now, but by this time next year half the frames will have collapsed.”
I can accept the house-equals-movie analogy only so far: if a house is built along unsound engineering principals it will fall apart, just as a movie assembled with no regard for the rules of cinema will fail. But one need not be an architect to know what a collapsed house looks like; why must one have formal training in the History of Cinema to recognise the wreckage of a failed movie? (I’ll grant that film scholars would certainly have an edge at understanding why a given work has failed.)
We may never agree on this. You cited Hemingway as an author whose prose leaps off the page and sings; I’d cite as him as a member of the Western Canon whose transparent, style-free prose has always bored me to tears. That both of us could cite the same author to support such utterly opposite positions makes me wonder if we haven’t somehow strayed into the reaches of religious argument. But I think that at least two telling points have emerged from this dialog: 1) that we could argue endlessly about the merits and failings of Jackson’s trilogy, and 2) that Jackson’s trilogy is worth arguing about.
As I recall, movies like 2001 provoked the same sort of heated discussion in their day. I think that says something.