You've probably talked about this, because I tend to avoid this thread -- I don't really want too many spoilers.
But you can't too easily avoid the recurring and now just about confirmed rumors that Sauron appears in the ending -- and that Aragorn has a swordfight with him?
Now, when I've seen that last, I've averted my eyes, because I SO don't want it to be true!!
Can Jackson go THAT wrong? Maybe he can. For instance, the longer I've thought about it, and now re-reading that part of LOTR (just last night, in fact), I feel Jackson made a rare but really nasty misstep in his handling of Faramir, and that whole episode. That tells me that he can make really significant miscalls, though he usually doesn't.
It's one of the striking facets, and a literary study in itself, that Sauron is The Big Bad of the entire trilogy but he never personally appears! It's a study in Stephen King's Big Bug theory, that the bug you don't see is always scarier than the one you do. It allows the imagination to manufacture what IT finds scary, which is always worse than what a frontal description will do.
Now, I had a similar worry when I read, years ago now, that Jackson was going to show Sauron in the opening scenes. "Big mistake," I thought. But that was carried off in a masterful display of seen/unseen, and it worked.
But this would be SO wrong. Sauron, having a SWORD-fight with Aragorn? I just want someone either to tell me it isn't true, or to shake Jackson by the shoulders and say, "It's all so good, we'll forgive you for Faramir -- but for the love of all that's decent, don't do this!!!"
Thoughts?
Dan