Looking inside the Sauron Project - Page 3
© Michael Martinez
Now, there's a novel idea.
Everyone needs a good villain. But three movies need a really good villain. So far all we've heard about Sauron is that he's been portrayed by a stunt actor in a funny blue suit...no, wait, that's Superman. Sauron "was completely encased in shiny, jagged-steel armor and a ragged, dark blue cape."
Now, that's intriguing. "...The armor features a poison-ivy motif. Sauron's helmet, which masks his face completely, is like a sheep's skull with six jagged spikes. Think medieval knight meets kitchen appliance."
Hm. RonCo designs Sauron's armor. Infomercial at 11PM on every cable channel you can imagine. Oh, the merchandising deal that must have come from!
Seriously, Peter Jackson has his work cut out for him. It's not like Tolkien made it easy to portray Sauron. The Big Bad Guy shows up in two accounts of the history of the One Ring (Gandalf's in "The Shadow of the Past" and Elrond's in "The Council of Elrond"), Gollum's slightly haunted recollection of the fact that Sauron has only nine fingers, Pippin's brief discussion with him through a Palantir, as a possible source for the bad weather on Caradhras, the mountain over Moria, as an impotent shadow just moments after he realizes where the Ring is, as a vaguely defined figure far to the south who detects Frodo on Amon Hen and eagerly searches for him, and as a partridge in a pear tree. Okay, maybe the partridge was just one of Sauron's less infamous servants.
How do you dress up a villain so powerful he moves entire nations to war without having to sign a single loan guarantee or going on television to explain that there is more at stake than the price of oil? It's hard to imagine Sauron having fireside chats with the Orcs of Mordor to get them all warmed up for the coming onslaught. More likely he'd roast a few hundred of them for breakfast just to remind the rest of the crew who was in charge.
And what is it about fantasy movies that they have to dress up their villains in skulls? Sauron is an angelic being. A fallen angelic being. Should he really be prancing around in a sheep's skull? Didn't he see what happened to the skull-helmed evil general in "Willow"? Maybe it's a good thing Val Kilmer wasn't picked to play Frodo. The final confrontation between hero and villain would have been overshadowed by the George Lucas/Ron Howard classic (okay, it was classic for "Willow" fans, and it shared a name with one of Tolkien's evil trees, and there is sawdust in the remains of trees).
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