I've never really enjoyed war scenes that much. I can't really follow what's going on fast enough to understand it and care about it. I went to this movie with my boyfriend, and he was saying things like, 'Wow, that was really cool how he impaled himself on the other guy's sword so he could get close enough to stab him,' and I was like, 'Wait, when did that happen? I didn't even see that!' I just see people moving around in a blur waving weapons around. I would not be a very good fighter. So, this entire movie was basically just incomprehensible and uninteresting for me.
Not only that, but I forgot about various characters dying, because it had been so long since I read the book, and so I was all looking forward to a happy ending where nobody died. Oops.
A lot of times, when I see people fighting in a big melee, I can't tell who's who, or which side they're on. So I have no sense of the importance of this moment. It is totally insignificant and meaningless to me. I can't say, 'Wow, Big Huge Important Character X, with all of his motivations and his history, is, right this very moment, having an epic battle against Big Huge Important Character Y! This is awesome!' Instead I'm like, 'Okay, some guy who might be one of the good guys, I guess, I can't really see who that is - oh, he's dead now, okay, moving on.'
This has ALWAYS been a problem for me when I watched any kind of war-battle movie. It was horrible when I was required to watch those sorts of historical movies back when I was in school. I had absolutely not the foggiest clue who was who and what was going on and why it mattered, and I could never answer any questions about the movie afterwards. 'A bunch of people fighting' is my summary.
Even though my boyfriend was able to understand what was going on a bit better than I could, he still didn't really love the movie that much, but then, he hadn't read any of the books and didn't have all the backstory and all that, so it wouldn't have been as meaningful. It was kind of funny and awful when a friend of the family came to visit at his parents' house and invited him out to see this movie again, only a couple days after he and I had seen it together. Both of us were suppressing the urge to tell him that he had already seen the movie, and so he ended up going and seeing it again. I guess he would have had to pretend to be surprised by everything that was happening. So neither he, nor I, felt that it was the type of movie we would want to see over and over and over again - and yes, I do in fact go to see movies multiple times if I like them, sometimes a shocking number of times (that is, when I have money and can afford to waste it on going out to the movies).
About me not being able to watch a fight and understand it: I don't have any problems with my eyesight or anything, but for some reason, I just can't pay attention to hundreds of moving objects in a big mess of chaos, and be able to tell which objects are threatening to me so that I can dodge them, and which objects are a vulnerability so that I can stab them. My brain just can't process that.
In that respect, I am a typical girly female. When they study the differences between the *average* men's and women's brains (I emphasize 'average,' because there are many exceptions to this general rule), they find it really is true that women aren't as good at the things associated with fighting battles.
On the other hand, there is something I can do which I think is an amazing ability of the brain and the visual processing center: I can recognize particular growing plants that are edible or useful, amongst a mess of weeds, if I am moving past this mess of weeds really quickly - the familiar edible/useful plant shapes just jump right out at me, no matter what kind of chaos is in the background. They're not moving in a three-dimensional field and attacking me.
Well, and another thing about the fighting. I'm always thinking to myself, like the sneaky evil terrorist that I am, that there must be some other way to get in and fight the battle, without doing it in a big mass on this open field. I'd rather see somebody sneak in and sabotage something without warning them. So I was much more fascinated with the plot of Frodo and Sam going - wait, wrong movie, well, you get the idea, Frodo and Sam going in to destroy the One Ring. Or Luke Skywalker and all of them shooting a bomb through the little ventilation shaft thingy and destroying the Death Star (seriously? what kind of idiot would design a Death Star like that?). I like that kind of fighting. The melee on the open field just seems so horribly wasteful to me. You can't just throw people away like that.