Looking inside the Sauron Project - Page 6
© Michael Martinez
So how does Peter Jackson go about not destroying the character of Sauron the way so many previous attempts at bringing Dark Lords to the screen have? And there have indeed been attempts to create Dark Lords, even if they didn't swell up over the ruins of their fallen fortresses the way Sauron does in the book.
Look at the Indiana Jones movies. There is always a Dark Lord in the background whom the hero never confronts: Hitler in the first and third movies, Kali in the second movie. Indy came close in the third movie. All he had to do was pull his gun and shoot and the world would have missed out on a terrible war. But he had more important matters to attend to, such as catching the next Zeppelin out of Germany. Ah well, such are the choices of mortal men.
Thulsa Doom was kind of a disappointment for me in "Conan the Barbarian". That is not to say that James Earl Jones doesn't do a great villain. Hey, I loved Darth Vader's voice just like everyone else (and no disrespect intended to David Prowse -- he postures better than any other bad guy). But Thulsa Doom looked like a middle-aged man trying to pass himself off as a hippie. What was with the hippie look anyway? The first scene with Doom, where he lopped off the head of Conan's gorgeous mother, was well-played. I love that scene. Jones is pure evil there. But later on he's just a debauched, corrupted, wasted villain. He comes across as someone who has lopped off one head too many. Thulsa Doom squanders his power by ordering beautiful girls to jump to their deaths and slithering off as a snake while his beast guards are slaughtered by a barbarian and a couple of thieves. He's just not a Very Bad Guy.
Maybe the greatest obstacle for modern fantasy is that somewhere along the way someone defined the need for the story to give a face to the major villain. In the old pulp stories with Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, Conan and Kull, the swashbuckling hero always had to find the one big bad guy and kill him off. Never failed. Whatever the situation was, whoever kidnaped the princess (or slave girl, or whomever) was a really truly bad guy who had an army of nasty bad guys serving him. The hero would literally fight and slag his way to the main villain for a climactic encounter.
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