I think docking any points from a movie called Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure on the basis of less than perfect plot structure seems to be missing a large chunk of the concept. 

I don't know if this is a justification problem or not, but this always bothered me.  In the Lord of the Rings movies, everyone keeps saying that the ring needs to be destroyed because its power corrupts and they don't want Sauron to have to come after them to find it.  So instead they go ahead with several battles in open warfare with the guy and his forces to buy time for ONE HOBBIT with no special skills whatsoever to take the ring to Mordor.

It just seems completely asinine.  For one- WHY exactly don't you want Sauron to march his forces all the way across Middle Earth and come to you?  That seems like exactly what you want to have happen.  They're going to move really fucking slowly, you have time to gather ALL your allies and you can probably hit them from all sides on their way over.  AND it would leave Mordor completely unguarded.  Secondly, why the hell are you trusting the little farm midget with the ring?  Aragorn is a RANGER.  He knows other RANGERS.  These are Middle Earth Spetsnaz, man.  I'm going to leave alone the "eagles take the damn thing" argument as it's been given a compelling counter argument, but allowing the hobbits to do it doesn't seem like a good idea outwardly, and they definitely almost failed several times due to incompetence.   I know that it's a story, and the whole POINT is that these two little hobbits save the world, but the setup involves making several very unwise decisions.

Eh, the why-hobbits thing was handled pretty deftly in the novel. It was more of a just-trust-us thing in the movies, but in the book it was really clear that hobbits, due to their inborn humility and down-to-middle-earthness are more resistant to the ring's temptations than anybody else. Frodo had to carry the ring for like a year or something, and he almost made it out okay. Gollum had the ring for hundreds of years, and the worst that came of that is that he lost his mind. Nobody but a hobbit could have done it, was the justification for that one, and I give it a pass.

I have a bigger problem with the fact that, due to the retrograde storytelling involved, the surviving Jedi ended up hiding Darth Vader's son — one of the two most important children in the galaxy — on Vader's homeworld … with his family … under his family name.

My pet theory? Luke was the decoy. Vader was supposed to murder him before he was on solid foods, thereby leaving Leia safe to grow up and make with the heroics.

I think that comes down to the Elves thinking a) the forces of good are totally outnumbered/outclassed this time, what with many of the elves already overseas and the race of man not as badass as he use to be, and b) we're going to invent a strategy that sends the enemy away from the strong human fortifications and through our forests? No Elfin way! Besides, even if they did go with that you'd want the ring to already be in the south when the main armies started making noise and drawing Sauron north. Otherwise the ring would be trapped in Rivendale until Sauron was in fact defeated, in which case why destroy the ring?

Having leaders who make bad choices based on incomplete information is rather realistic

I have a much larger objection to the justification for how Sauron was first defeated -- aka, the justification for the entire story.

So it's the Last Alliance and Sauron is blowing through the ranks with his megahammer. And yet when he has the King of Men completely on the ropes, instead of pounding him into a smooth and creamy man-paste then and there on the slopes of Mount Doom with said megahammer, he slowly reaches for him, Ring of Power-first, giving Isildur a clean shot at the only thing that could destroy him.

To be fair to Peter Jackson, Tolkien didn't give him much help here. The books only say that Isildur cut the ring from Sauron's hand, it never really goes into detail how.

But. Come on.

There are very few perfectly plotted stories in the world. If you pick any story from the epic of Gilgamesh on forward and think on it long enough, you can probably find some aspect of it that stretches credulity, or just doesn't make any damn sense.

The trick is to entertain the audience sufficiently that they just don't care.

It's like Trey says on the podcast sometimes: "I'm going to allow this." You want me to buy that the alien has no apparent metabolic cycle and that its blood is incredibly corrosive to both metal and flesh? Okay, mister fancy-pants Hollywood writer, I'm gonna go along with that for the time being. But you better make it worth my while.

The telling of stories differs from, y'know, fraud in that it's mutually consensual. I, the audience, agree to go along with some basic premise, even if it's nothing more than "Once upon a time." You, the writer, have to uphold your end of our deal by captivating me. If the writer fails to provide the audience with a quantity of entertainment sufficient to justify their investment of attention and credulity, then the writer has failed.

But … y'know … if the audience just crosses its arms and refuses to go along with anything, then it's the audience that's failed.

Sauron in the films is disembodied. I don't remember the details of how his character was described in the book, but I'm pretty sure it was at least ambiguous. Clearly he didn't start out disembodied; little point in making a ring if you don't have fingers. So somehow Sauron had to go from being embodied to disembodied. I thought the way it was handled in the prologue of the films was pretty economical.

But really, when we talk about the book-versus-film thing, we're getting into a whole nother realm of meta-justification. Why does thing X happen? Because that's how it is in the book. Why does other thing Y happen? Because what was in the book would have made shitty cinema. And so on.

This isn't really a justification but since I have a group of Tolkien-literate people all in one spot and I just watched Return of the King, I want to toss out something that occurred to me.

When the Black Captain falls to our blonde heroine, why doesn't anyone think to snatch up his INCREDIBLY FUCKING POWERFUL RING OF POWER that is just laying there on the battlefield?  I mean, he definitely, definitely has one.  And I can't think of a reason he WOULDN'T be wearing it.  And even if you aren't going to pick it up and USE the damn thing, it seems wholly irresponsible to just leave it there, which is what appears to happen.  I'm racking my brains and I'm pretty sure this wasn't addressed in the book either.  I mean, I give the hobbit and Eowyn the benefit of the doubt for not immediately snatching that shit, but when Gandalf saw it or heard about it you'd think that would be kind of a big deal to him.

Obviously nothing came of it, but it seems out of character for Gandalf to let a ring go unaccounted for like that, especially given the circumstances.