Hiking in movies

One of the things I love about The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is that while reading those books you can really *feel* how it is to travel. In particular you can feel how it is to travel by foot.
I have done some hiking myself and at least for me there is a special magic to exploring a landscape on your own two feet that is not evoked by any other form of travel. I'm not sure what it is - it includes moments like reaching the highest point of a pass and finally being able to see the valley on the other side, or looking back after an hour of walking and realizing the distance you made - but there is much more to it and I can't easily describe it in a few sentences.
Whatever it is, I think Tolkien managed to transport it quite well in his novels (actually it is said that Tolkien himself loved to make long walks through the English countryside). In Peter Jackson's movies on the other hand it is missing almost entirely. There is certainly no lack of trying - we see great panoramas of landscapes, helicopter flights through snow-covered mountains; we follow the heroes as they walk through brush, moorland, grassland, forest and all other kinds of temperate biome you could imagine. We see them walking, stumbling and climbing.
But still - at least for me this always looks like actors dropped in a scenic landscape (which it of course is) - that is, slightly soulless and artificial. I don't even think the movies are bad in general, I think given the economical constraints (mass appeal required to get back the gigantic investment) they are even close to a best-case scenario. But in this particular aspect they fail almost completely.
But now comes the funny thing. The other day I checked some video clips we made when we had been hiking in the Peak District with the kids the last time. Nothing special really - greyish weather, us, sheep, some hills. But there it was - even in these short amateurish clips, made with a cheap flip camera, I found the "spirit of hiking" was clearly recognizable!
Now, the really interesting thing to ask is of course, why is that so? The non-interesting answer would be that my personal experience (having been on that hike myself) colours my perception and that for everybody else the videos would be just as soulless as the mentioned movie scenes. This is perfectly possible of course, however I find it much more interesting to imagine that there is more to it than just that.
Here are a number of factors that I think might be responsible:

perfection

Pictures in Hollywood movies are perfect and glossy, my clips aren't. Perfection creates distance and a feeling of artificialness.

objective camera

In the movies we see the heroes stoically marching through New Zealand's Best Of. Since the heroes as well as said Best Of (and especially the combination of the two) cost a lot of money and supposedly are what the viewers want to see, the camera is quite busy putting them in the best light. Most of the time therefore we either see the landscape at a wide angle with the group of people somewhere in the middle or we see the latter from the front or the side passing the camera's position. That means we get an uninvolved (helicopter-equipped) spectator's view of what's going on, which is how we would experience a landscape when sitting in a car or a train (or a heli), but *not* how we experience it when walking through it.

speed

When a movie wants to show us that a car for instance is moving very fast, we usually see it approaching (very fast) to the camera's position (preferably at a turn), passing it and then moving away. The camera usually stays fixed at its position and only turns to keep the car in focus.
When filming people walking in contrast directors seem to think that walking per se is a far too boring activity to keep the viewer's attention. Therefore the camera compensates by moving around the person. Approaching it from the back, passing it, approaching it from the front, circling it, etc. This all makes for a busy picture however it does *not* convey the feeling of slowness that is defining for walking. I think essentially walking is usually shown as an activity while in reality it is more of a state.

So, after all this - what do we see in my clip? We see a slow pan of the (greyish, wet, sheep-dotted) landscape. Then a group of people overtakes the camera and slowly (in walking speed that is) moves downwards a small hill, climbs a fence gate and disappears down a path. As I said, really nothing special and more than anything proof of my utter lack of cinematographic ability. Still (for me) it perfectly transports the slowness and smallness of people moving through a landscape by foot.