12. Sauron

The Lord Of The Rings trilogy and the Hobbit trilogy (2001 – 2014)

“A great eye, lidless, wreathed in flame.” This description of the Dark Lord of Mordor is all well and good on paper, but how the hell do you make a massive fiery peeper remotely sinister on screen? Somehow, Peter Jackson and the Lord Of The Rings team pulled it off. It helped that the prologue shows us Sauron as an enormous, mace-wielding maniac, capable of twatting entire battalions with a single blow. But even when he loses his corporeal form he’s the stuff of nightmares, flashing into Frodo’s mind whenever he touches the Ring and scouring the land around him like a very angry person looking for a contacts lens.

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