Having recently rewatched Willow it is still a very solid movie that holds up quite well. And yes, if I were to sum it up, I would say it is "Lord of the Rings" put through a Star Wars processor. I mean it's so obvious even MovieBob spotted it.
HOWEVER...
First of all, the "no luke" is idiotic because Willow IS LUKE. As a POP CULTURE SAVANT should know, in some of George Lucas' early drafts, Luke Skywalker was an old man and general. I mean in the movie Willow lives on a backwater farm at the edge of a major empire
and is training to learn magic. And through the film,
he continues to learn magic from said old wizards. In fact the only thing that really separates Willow from Luke is that Willow is older with a family already. Heck he even has a brunette friend he travels for a bit with before they are split apart. AGAIN, a pop culture person should be aware that there is a lot of overlap with this and earlier drafts of Star Wars which had Biggs Darklighter in them. This is how bad Bobby is at his damn job - the characters are alike in 90% of their respects but he apparently can't see it because of that divergent 10%.
And the whole "nifty female sort-of-"Vader"" just...
This is so dumb, BECAUSE THE MOVIE HAD A LITERAL VADER IN IT:
If anything the smoking-redhead Sorsha is a Leia stand-in only Lucas is flipping the script and starting her out on the bad guy side this time instead of being captured. In Willow, they "rescue" her from the dark side via Val Kilmer's dreamy lips rather than storming the death star.
That's what makes this so funny:
Because if you know your Lucas history, it's really debatable whether he's "subverting" anything or is just going back to the well for ideas he had before. But that's a whole other rant.