[Lush]

Well, I just think the original line that Son of Númenor quoted, the whole "destroy evil forever" crap, is just bad. I view it more as an instance of an unfortunate screenwriting decision. It's silly and melodramatic. Later on in the film, Elrond harps on about the Ring in the same fashion, "evil was allowed to endure..." Blah blah blah. Here too is the seeming notion that if you destroy the Ring, you destroy everything evil.

I think if anything the films tend to suffer from a number of unfortunate utterances that periodically break the melancholic spell. They take this notion of evil that Tolkien cultivated in the books, and sap the magic and mystery and terror out of it. Having said that, for me the FotR (from which both the "bad" lines are quoted) worked best as a movie about defeat. It wasn't, a few mis-steps aside, particularly, er, bouncy. The other two didn't do it for me so much on that level.