THUD: NEW TRAILER OF THRONES

Joshua Miller, Jason Momoa is in this? Finally tv gets a more interesting...Conan! The Game Of Thrones should be good training for the latest adventures of the big screen Cimmerian! I cannot wait for this series.

If you like Momoa being shirtless and swinging a giant sword, you're all set with Game of Thrones then. Guaranteed to be plenty of that. Plus, horses.

So we have this, and Starz is making Camelot. I wonder if fantasy would ever catch on with network tv (hahaha).

As somebody that has only read some of the books this looks like shit. Films are films and television is television. Most baloon budgeted fantasy movies these days can't even manage to look convincing. How the fuck does anyone expect a television show to, even with the budget this gets an episode?

James Woods' Career, Well for one, It is not tv, it is...HBO! Fantasy on tv has not been too successful. I did enjoy the short lived...Wizards and Warriors though.

I think the show is going to have to ask for a BBC level of audience indulgence.

Boardwalk is a different beast. Even that cost 60 million just to get the sets and pilot right. Carnivale and Deadwood also managed well with their budgets. They looked good and cost a fortune. They were also cancelled for being expensive.

Rome never looked convincing and cost a fortune. I just don't see why any network would pick up a fantasy show.

If the series matches or surpasses the books on characterization and the "WTF happens next?!" factor, I'm more than ready to forgive a small budget.

Thing is, aside from three baby dragons and some zombie-esque creatures, there's not a whole lot of "fantasy" in the books. For large stretches, it's simply the War of the Roses set in a fictional world.

Agreed that the story doesn't call for showy CGI/creature effects most of the time. But the scope and far-flung locales cetainly scream for a large budget for sets, practical and digital. If, though, the acting and plotting, match or leapfrog the book in quality, then I'm more than likely to forgive chintzy backdrops.

Yeah I loved how for some of the big battles in Rome they would just show a real tight closeup of three guys swinging swords in slow motion.

Most fantasy outside of Tolkien and the 80's just comes across as dumb to me so this has a long way to go to prove its worth watching. Granted I don't have cable, let alone HBO so I guess it doesn't really matter what I think.

I don't like GAME OF THRONES as a project for HBO (really down on their whole direction ever since 2007 and the cancellation of a certain program), but I said the exact same thing about HBO's ability to do ROME convincingly, and we all know how that turned out. I thought ROME would be a travesty, and when all was said and done HBO managed to create what I consider to be the definitive portrayal of ancient Rome on screen. It makes GLADIATOR look laughably fake in comparison

So anyway, I wouldn't discount HBO's ability to tackle subject matter of epic scale

They're certainly downplaying any fantastical elements in the glimpses we've gotten so far, and selling it as a more straightforward medieval drama. It doesn't look like it should be much more expensive than any other period piece.

I thought Rome was very convincing. Yes, it was sometimes conspicuous how they eschewed big battle scenes, but in terms of what you actually saw, everything was marvelously detailed and lived-in.

I'm with you, Schwartz. I've never understood those who harp about ROME's supposed lack of battles. The battle we see in episode one is very realistically staged, and is intimate and gritty


The rest of the fight scenes throughout the series are all great*, and the arena showdown in E11S1 stands as the best staged gladiatorial combat scene I've ever witnessed. I was literally bawling my eyes out the entire last 15 minutes of that episode, as I was certain Pullo would die. One of the best scenes of the aughts, film or TV, IMHO

As for not showing the battle in E5S1? Well, the show spent 100 million dollars on sets and extras in Italy. They couldn't afford a big battle. I'm not going to blame them for that. What that did though was force them to raise their game for that whole episode, and the prebattle montage is gripping and emotionally wrenching (Jeff Beal is a genius, his music sells the moment wonderfully). Caesar's delivery of the "Goodbye, Posca" line just kills me. It's perfect. The description we hear of the battle from Kenneth Cranham in the next episode tells us all we need to know about what went down anyway. I'm glad we got more plot and emotion instead of a bunch of fighting, ultimately, since there were only 22 episodes of ROME ever produced


Oh, and one last thing. It's dishonest for people (not talking about you, Schwartz) to pretend the show had zero large scale battles. E6S2, anyone?



PS Some blogging I've done about the sets built for ROME:

POST 1

POST 2


EDIT: And let's not forget about Pullo's ax wielding craziness from E8S2! And.... the triumph sequence from E100S1, the most complex sequence of the entire season, is a million times cooler than a battle IMHO

*except, bizarrely, the final fight scene of the series outside Alexandria in E10S2. Sadly I think they were too rushed to work out the staging for that, as it feels kind of fake and disjointed compared to everything else that came before.. tragic when you consider it's a fight that ends with one of the leads being mortally wounded. I wish it would have felt like a weightier moment

They actually aren't downplaying anything. The later seasons (if it doesn't get canceled for being too expensive) will become closer to classic fantasy, but season one is very straight. No monsters or elves. The one dwarf character is an actual human dwarf, not the fictional kind.

I actually really enjoy the books, and am stoked for the show, precisely because it avoids a lot of the stupid crap that most fantasy series fall into. It's got a story based around character interactions rather than questing to retrieve magic items, it's got something resembling moral complexity rather than simpleminded good vs. evil or Heroes' Journey tropes, its use of magic and monsters is admirably restrained and atmospheric, and the narrative, despite consisting of several books which are individually longer than the entirety of LOTR, is surprisingly tight and certainly compelling. You actually feel like Martin actually NEEDS all that space to tell the story, instead of just padding it out (well, until the fourth book, but let's not go there). And yes, reading the books, it felt amazingly suited to an HBO series. It really does read almost exactly like Rome or Deadwood in a fantasy world.

And yeah, season/book one wouldn't require piles of expensive FX; there are a lot of far-flung locations, but that's one of the easier things to pull off. You have to admit, though, by the time they get to season/book three, there's some pretty epic fantasy shit that would seem to require a significant budget. There *might* be ways to pull it off a little more cheaply, though...the two biggest battles of the books, for instance, take place at night on a burning river and inside a narrow gap in the Wall, respectively, so they could get away with not showing too much.

The presence of Sean Bean an Lena Headley mean I will definitely be watching, and pretty damn sure the acting will be able to overcome some of the handicaps of the book.

I also like the look alot, it looks like the beginning of Kingdom of Heaven.

Couldn't find an appropriate thread so I'm bumping this. I know people seem really excited about this, but as someone who has never read the books, this looks soooo very, very boring. The best way I can describe what I've seen so far is Sean Bean and bad wigs. That is all. From what I understand, this thing isn't about a bunch of D&D wizardy and talking dragons and all that bullshit, which is great, but whatever it is about hasn't grabbed me at all. It looks like LARPER: The Television Series.*

 

 

 

 

 

 

*I only just recently learned what a LARPER is, I didn't even know they had an acronym.

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/user/GameofThrones has a ton of other videos.

 

 

 

The ironic thing is that the great strength of the series--the fact that it's heavily character-based rather than featuring lots of "talking dragons and all that bullshit", and the plot is quite complex--means there aren't a lot of snazzy FX shots to sell you with, and it's hard to boil the story down to a logline. But seriously, give the first episode a chance. I have a love-hate relationship with fantasy, but I really enjoyed the books. They do a lot of the stuff right that most fantasy series get wrong.