I've never read LOTR, actually, but I assume Orcs are portrayed as unsympathetically in the book as they are in the films?
It's...complicated. Many, many pages, and quite possibly a doctoral thesis or two for all I know, have been written on the philosophical and spiritual implications of Tolkien's orcs. For a start, the orcs were not originally created evil - they were made from elves who were captured and "twisted" or "corrupted", via unspecified tortures, by Morgoth, the original Dark Lord (Sauron's boss, back in the day). Evil can never create, you see, only pervert in mockery what was originally made by Go(o)d. Morgoth, in particular, is basically Lucifer: originally the brightest and best of the angels but cast into the Pit on account of his hubris before God.
So you have these orcs, which were originally elves, which have been
made evil through no fault of their own. But how 'evil' are you really if you have no choice but to be evil? Some writers have even suggested there are hints that the orcs are not totally irredeemable, although it's certainly no more than hinted, if so. It's all about original sin, predestination and free will, of course - Tolkien being slightly more Catholic than, say, your typical pope.
It's funny that good and evil should come up here, as nothing could be more off-topic in a thread about Lovecraft. I've often thought these two writers are in some ways perfectly parallel and in others, diametrically opposed. You have these two guys who were both absolutely aghast at modernity in general and who dealt with the spiritual (Tolkien) and cultural (Lovecraft) threats posed by industry, technology and capitalism by retreating, like any reactionary, into an idealized version of the past. Which for arch-Romantic Tolkien was a fantasy version of mediaeval Merrie England, and for materialist-atheist-Classicist Lovecraft was the stately, dispassionate, scientific Enlightenment. This is slightly complicated by Lovecraft's adoption in later life of moderate socialism, but I don't think that altered his fundamental worldview.
They were both Eurocentric cultural supremacists, I suppose, although to vastly different degrees. Tolkien actually held Jewish culture in rather high esteem. His orcs and Easterlings don't really mirror Russians, Arabs, Turks or any particular 'Eastern' (from a European POV) culture, they're just sort of generically savage and foreign, although I guess the Southrons are pretty unambiguously black.