Had time yesterday to re-watch The Fellowship of the Ring. I am almost speechless at just how moving and how awesome this movie was. Peter Jackson truly created a World on Film that lives and breathes like no other. Will we ever see another movie whether from a franchise or original that even comes close?
I think one has to consider how much of this is the movie, and how much of this is oneself.
You can only experience a certain kind of magic for the first real time once. Not necessarily the very first time you experience something, but the first time it's revelatory for you. You can see this with MMORPGs particularly clearly, because they've been going for decades now, and people's revelatory experiences with them are all on different MMORPGs. But almost always people think it's because that specific MMORPG was extra-special and unique and was first MMORPG to really "do it right". For example, I've heard the same sort of "We'll never see a game like this again!" language applied to Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, Star Wars Galaxies, Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes, World of Warcraft, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Final Fantasy 11, Final Fantasy 14, and even, astonishingly, Destiny 2 (yes 2 specifically). People wax lyrical about magical and amazing these games were as experiences, and how modern MMOs just can't match up, and how much things have gone downhill, and so on, and it's like, what is the actual commonality here? Because they can't all be magical in that way, especially as people who were blown away by EQ often see WoW as dumb and run of the mill, or people blown away by WoW see SWTOR as "not special" and so on. And if you talk to people about it, it becomes clear what the commonality actually is - it's the first MMO they
really got into. Not necessarily the first they played - the first they really got into.
I think a slightly similar thing is happening with LotR. It's that magical not because the films are just that good (they're kind of a mess in some ways, especially the long versions), but because it's the perhaps first time we saw fantasy translated from book to screen so superbly, so unexpectedly, and just so brilliantly on so many levels (consistent tone, style/art design, music, seriousness, grasp of the material) that it blew people away, but probably just seems like "some film old people like" to a lot of people under 30 - but I suspect for many of them there's a run of MCU movies which have the same impact.
I do however share your feeling that I was lucky to be there when these first hit the cinema and absolutely blew me away.