As a huge fan, I always found it fascinating to learn about what could have been in the final battle! Apparently, Peter Jackson actually filmed a scene where Sauron himself appears at the Black Gate. It wasn’t just some shadowy figure, either! He would have initially shown up looking like the beautiful angel, Annatar – you know, his guise from the books – before transforming into that massive, terrifying form we saw in the prologue of The Fellowship of the Ring. They even had a whole fight planned where Aragorn would challenge him, but Sauron would knock him down. Just as Sauron was about to finish Aragorn off, the Ring would have been destroyed, and Sauron would explode – similar to how he was defeated by Isildur in the prologue. Sadly, Jackson ended up cutting the whole thing! He replaced Sauron with an armored troll, and cleverly reused the heroes’ reactions to Annatar as if they were reacting to the Eye of Sauron. While some fans, like me, are glad they stuck closer to the book, others think it would have been an amazing action sequence to end the trilogy. Honestly, there’s a good case to be made for both sides!
