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So, much as I love the concept of Saruman as a separate and distinct force (which works fine in the books, as we don't meet Saruman until he is all but defeated) I do think that they made the right choice for the films here.~SpM
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I think it comes down to whether the concept of Saruman being a seperate, individual threat to the "good guys," or being a puppet/underling of Sauron would be too complicated and confusing, or not.
I personally don't think it would be too confusing to establish Saruman as a seperate threat to Sauron. (Eventhough Elrond does say something like "we cannot contend with Isengard and Mordor...etc) he's still the puppet of Sauron in the movies..."What orders from Mordor, my lord? What does the eye Command?" Yes, Saruman is another threat to Middle-earth, but he's not seperate one on his own.
As I've already stated it undermines Saruman's own character. It's been done in movies before, so the concept shouldn't be too confusing if seen. As I mentioned
Braveheart, but there's also movies like
Star Wars, where we have the Republic (future Galactic Empire) facing the Seperatists, and the Jedi Council is stuck in the middle...what the heck do we do?
Eventhough we know in the books that Sauron is fully aware of what Saruman is up to and only using him to suit his own purposes, in Saruman's own mind he can undermine and defeat Sauron if he gets a hold of the Ring. This shouldn't be too complicated to establish in the movies. Instead of saying "We must join with Sauron," he could say "Join me Gandalf, and together we can defeat Sauron and restore Order back to Middle-earth, and we can rule them like we should." (Maybe something less corny but that's basically what Saruman's own intentions were, is to rule Middle-earth himself.
Also, it's something that the movie hasn't already tackled, as we see with Boromir, and later with Denethor the idea of using the ring to overthrow Sauron. And we even have Boromir in the books say..."Is Saruman not right in using Sauron's own weapon against him" (something like that). So, it's not like this idea of Saruman wanting the Ring for himself to rule would all of a sudden get people flabberghasted and confused, it would actually be something that would be expected..."Hey why not get the Ring to me so I can defeat Sauron." Then Gandalf of course being the good guy would explain to Saruman it's all wrong and we have the wizard fight.
Again, this isn't something that would be overly-complicated to do, it's actually a fairly common thing in movies to establish sort of this third party/extra, yet seperate hurdle for the good guys to get over.