This afternoon I had the misfortune of stumbling across an eighties film called 'Hawk The Slayer'. To me it represented the worst of what Hollywood considers a fantasy environment. ...A series of set piece scenes rather than a coherent narrative with a consistent backdrop. ...Places are simply there to stage a scene, not because a scene needed to be played out somewhere in the fantasy world.
This actually isn't an unusual storytelling style in basic pulp sensibility; this kind of thing is not dissimilar from the basic plot structure of many a
Shadow or
Spider story, which emphasize set piece spectacle usually without much emphasis on character development or interior drama.
I think one difference is that in most pulp stories you have a single author who is, if not always in love with his material, at least comfortable enough to do a quick and competent turnaround of it in ways that will deliver the enjoyment the readers want. Pulp only really works if the creators bring enough energy to it that audiences are swept along before they can dwell on the melodramatic thinness of the characters and themes. The problem with any even moderate-budget Hollywood film is that it's the ultimate committee production, and the odds are good that in any given cast and crew (especially in the '80s before Harry Potter, LOTR and the MCU took over movie theatres and most people didn't think highly of FX-heavy fantasy) the majority will be there solely to turn in the minimum effort they need for their paycheck. That shows, much as individual professionals might like to think it doesn't.
I honestly think that part of why the LOTR Jackson films worked as well as they did was that if you look at the behind the scenes production materials, it's clear that
everyone involved in those films, from Jackson on down to the newest on-set grips, knew what they were doing, cared about it and wanted to do it for its own sake.