Argh, it's hard not to pick out those book-to-film differences, but I have decided I shall resist!
Anyway, this has finally made me look at some of the commentary tracks, which i have never bothered with until this point as I tend to find them very tiresome after a few minutes. I do like to simply enjoy a film without having someone telling me all about it; it's like going to the cinema and having some idiot talk his wife all the way through the film...
Did anyone else notice how some of the Orcs would later be seen on the Pelennor Fields? I liked this. Some might accuse PJ of being a cheapskate and recycling his footage, but no, in this context it works. Orcs, like Elves, have endless lives, maybe they even have their own 'Halls of mandos' and keep on coming back after death, so to have them reappear (or make their first appearance?) does in fact work.
I did like the way that light was used. The Ring glowing on Sauron's finger was interesting; I wonder if they intended that this might demonstrate how it was his Ring alone? How it could only truly be used properly by its maker? It was as though they wanted to show how the Ring's power tapped into either Light or some Dark version of it. Of course then Sauron's bodily destruction is represented by a blast wave of light.
Incidentally, in this blast wave, if you watch on freeze-frame you can see that nobody is actually felled by it. Other freeze-frame oddities I noticed included an elf with an uncanny resemblance to Legolas with brown hair, and Alan Lee as one of the Kings. And as for the other two Elven ring-bearers, they are Gil-galad and Cirdan (with grey hair, too).
I realised how much I like the design of the films while watching this Prologue again. Listening to what the people from the design team say on the commentaries it is clear that they are real fans of the books, as they attempted to make use of Tolkien's own designs as much as possible, even if those props were hardly seen. I think this is the area where the real Tolkien nerds were let loose, and it shows. Happily.
