This makes alot of sense to for how Sauron is portrayed between the two medias. While he is still very much evil, movie sauron is portrayed as this full fire and brimstone almost satanic figure, and the eye is a very iconic view of that. His dominion over middle-earth would mean its destruction.
Book sauron, the eye is literally a symbol placed everywhere as a mark to show his influence. He still has his humanoid form but is just weaker without his ring. And while he seeks to dominate middle-earth, it is not to destroy it, but essentially bring about what he considers to be order and then rule as its God.
If movie Sauron would win, middle-earth would be a place burning in ashes and orcs pillaging across it. Anarchy, death and fire.
If book Sauron would win, it would be basically tribatury fascist states which would revere him as a God. But it would be clean and âorderedâ.
I think that Peter Jackson probably did as close to the optimal job that anyone could do with applying the Lord of the Rings to the screen. Thatâs not to say I think the changes improve the story, but they make it suitable for the format of film and the cinema. Mordor needed to be visually striking, else it wouldnât have had enough of an impact to the viewer.
Then thereâs stuff like the Scouring of the Shire which just wouldnât befit a major live action depiction either. Itâs thematically appropriate for the book and the story Tolkien was telling there, but it would have been really confusing for the viewer, going from this amazing climax of Sauronâs defeat to Saruman renaming himself Sharky and trying to rule the Shire with a band of ruffians.
I donât think so, it would have played out similarly but with more spikes. Itâs not that Sauron was absent the understanding of how powerful fear can be. The Mouth of Sauronâs steed is this giant, horrid thing with fire blazing in its eyes in the book.
I like the movies, a bit differently to why I like the books, but Jackson did a good job and while alot is different, other parts is faithfully done.
And itâs exactly as you say, and something alot of movies struggle with. You often cant do a one to one transfer between medias, but at the same time there needs to be a balance on how much you alter to fit it.
I think Peter Jackson did it quite well all things considered. Entertaining certainly.
The visual of the Eye of Sauron in the movie is brilliant too. While itâs not said that thereâs literally a giant, blazing eye atop Barad Dur in the book, the imagery that inspires it is in Tolkienâs writing. I always took it as Sauron was inside the tower itself in the movie, using the Eye as like his magic telescope to watch everything going on.
Feature films have very tight pacing requirements. Even the way they were released, there was no shortage of complaints about how Return of the King dragged on after its main conflict was over. Making the post-Ring-destruction part even more book-accurate would have made the audiences livid.
But I do wish there was a TV series that had enough breathing room to replicate the feel of book Middle-earth and be more consistent to the themes of the source material than the movie trilogy could be because of the limitations of its medium.
Letâs also remember that Sauron is effectively a fallen angel in Tolkienâs setting. Heâs not quite Satan, because thatâs Melkor/Morgoth, but he is absolutely intended to evoke demonic imagery. Heâs goodness twisted into pride, wickedness, and evil. His appearance after losing his fair form was akin to malice taken shape.
Heâs the Kilâjaeden to Morgothâs Sargeras (they are directly inspired by Tolkienâs work).
Even more so with the fact that Sauron does see himself as Morgothâs successor, and then later on straight up as just Morgoth Incarnate/actually Morgoth. His hubris just grows and grows.
He serves as a sort of polar opposite for Gandalf.
There are some things that I would have personally changed (especially about Beren and Luthien, a story about which I hold Strong Opinions) â if anything, Iâd say it stays too true to the text and adds too little of its own, in a way that wouldnât have worked if episode scripts were to actually be written as outlined. But still itâs a good enough first approximation to how I would have conceived a Silmarillion TV series.
The movies kind of treat it as though the burning eye is his spiritual form with the âmanâ briefly as the dark shape within its iris. Thematically it works as a force of evil deprived of its physical form in a sort of biblically accurate (evil) angel aesthetic.
See also fashy love of neoclassical architecture and/or brutalism.
The last episode of S1 of Granblue Fantasy is just a stream of âHEY THIS CHARACTER IS IN THE GACHA ARENâT THEY COOL TOOâ cameos for like five solid minutes.
Instead of likeâŚfocusing on the characters we know+care about.
A lot of immediate post world war 2 architecture has a distressingly bleak uniformity due to being cheap for rebuilding, living space and creating jobs in places that werenât bombed to pieces. The place where I grew up has been described as the most depressing looking sight on earth.
