Game of Thrones ... because why not

[fuzzynormal]

How it looks is almost immaterial to the lousiness of the writing.  

Man, I really wanted to like this show a few years ago; seemed like it was actually building to an immersive compelling narrative.  I would forgive them their trope-y foibles thinking they had a handle on the overarching storytelling.  Hoo boy, in hindsight all the red flags are there.  Another example of production craft elevating script mediocrity.  

NOPE.  American Soap Operas are better at writing stuff than these guys.

[SR]

17 hours ago, Kisaha said:

It doesn't work at all like this!

SPOILER ALERT!

Hey, how bad the last episode was??!! 

Just terrible television, they tried to squeeze so much in there and everything seemed wrong in the end.

I am wondering why they have random durations, and didn't choose to make, let's say, 10 1-hour  episodes or something.

The whole thing is too random right now, and the plot seems like is written by Sea Manatees. 

These dragons perish too easily lately. What about Ghost? Seeing running against the dead with the Dothraki and in the 4th episode goes to the North to chill with his new friends?! Why don't the other have these beautiful big Ballistas? They had a castle, and then they left it and went up to the north, then came back down to water the plants, before go to King's Landing? 

So much poor script writing..

Just dreadful. Not a fan of her, but Dany deserved better. Her fall into the role of mad queen feels out of nowhere (we had one foreshadowing thus far?). Tyrion seems determined to be useless till the end. Bran's tuned out. And the dialogue was sooo tedious.

[Video Hummus]

Wow, so I've finally caught up with the latest season. The show has completely lost its edge. The latest episode felt like a Marvel movie spin off written by first year film and art students. I remember the first 3 seasons as being mesmerizing, engaging television. You cared about the characters and kinda dreaded watching the next episode for fear of what could happen. The intrigue and the suspense was soooo soo good.

We started to see the problem in season 7 but season 8 is complete garbage. They took an extra year to write this trash? This should be a text book example of how not to do a critically acclaimed book adaptation before the book series is done. After they left the pages of the books behind the show has plummeted in imagination and view experience.

Season 8 gets a 5/10 from me and EP4 a 2/10 Lazy television award. Who was the night king again? Ah who cares. We only spent the last 7 SEASONS building a story about his looming threat and then...LOL!

The details make this story special and engaging. Not just the marvel action scenes.

[Kisaha]

1 hour ago, Video Hummus said:

Wow, so I've finally caught up with the latest season. The show has completely lost its edge. The latest episode felt like a Marvel movie spin off written by first year film and art students. I remember the first 3 seasons as being mesmerizing, engaging television. You cared about the characters and kinda dreaded watching the next episode for fear of what could happen. The intrigue and the suspense was soooo soo good.

We started to see the problem in season 7 but season 8 is complete garbage. They took an extra year to write this trash? This should be a text book example of how not to do a critically acclaimed book adaptation before the book series is done. After they left the pages of the books behind the show has plummeted in imagination and view experience.

Season 8 gets a 5/10 from me and EP4 a 2/10 Lazy television award. Who was the night king again? Ah who cares. We only spent the last 7 SEASONS building a story about his looming threat and then...LOL!

The details make this story special and engaging. Not just the marvel action scenes.

Haha! So true! The first seasons were a great mix of medieval history with a spice of fantasy but then the thing went downhill very fast.

What happened to the Snakes? They created a whole chapter that didn't exist in the books for no reason at all. That went nowhere like so many sub stories, and suddenly, the few that have left are going to the North, to various castles and we are never going to see them again, while some crazy fools go down to King's Landing that something random will happen.

It seems to me that Benioff and CO, are just lucky to have the parents (his father is Stephen F£€$ing Friedman, for - his - God's shake! ) they have, and that gives them ultimate success, just because..when they had to do their part, failed miserably (also check Weiss's early tries, most of them were cancelled projects!). Benioff took one of the most established and influential storys of all time - the Iliad - and turned it into a mindless thing called Troy. How can you mess that? It is been studied and told for thousands of years!

Welcome to Hollywood..

[JurijTurnsek]

The show has been getting more ridicules after they ran out of book material. I have no doubt GRRM will do the story justice with the books, I just hope he lives long enough to finish the last one.

[SR]

Just found some spoilers on reddit that seems to have been around for more than a week, which outlined the plots for the 3th and 4th episode, along with the rest of the remaining episodes. It gets stupider. 

[nigelbb]

On 5/3/2019 at 6:47 AM, dalstorp said:

I watched it on a calibrated 55" OLED TV in a dark room and it was still to dark in some scenes! Heard that the made it dark to keep the vfx budget from going crazy.

We watched in the dark on a 60" LG plasma. It was pretty dark, but it was meant to be like that. I also assumed that they made it dark to cut down on the cost of VFX rather like the original version of Doom was always very dark so not too many pixels needed to shifted around.

The pace of the storytelling held up well & didn't drag over more than 80 minutes. There was especially brilliant 5.1 audio too.

[HurtinMinorKey]

Again I thought it was way too dark, but there was definitely shadow detail in almost every scene.   If anyone was seeing crushed blacks consistently, there probably is something wrong with their setup.  

[dslnc]

It took E.T. ages to be released for vhs/laserdisc back in the day. I was doomed to dark for viewing outside a theater/darkroom. So it got a ‘tv’ grade to make it more watchable in the living rooms. But it took 6+ years...

 

 

 

[tellure]

I just subscribed to HBO through Amazon to see what the quality difference was like.  I went back and watched a bit of the much-maligned Episode 3 and it looked way, way better.  HBO through Amazon looks like true 1080p at a good bitrate (for streaming).  HBO Go / Now still looks like upscaled 720p with terrible compression artifacts.  This is watching from Los Angeles, BTW.

[Digitgio]

My wife follow the series, after she told me about the dark battle (she closed all the windows to watch it) I tried to watch the 3rd episode. Yes is very dark, I think the problem was in the HDR to SDR conversion. Probably watch at it in HDR reference monitor like the Sony 300 (I think the one used in mastering) was very good but in SDR the result is very poor. I don’t know if the SDR conversion is on charge of the broadcasters, in this case is not completely a DOP fault. Aniway he must think  about it, pushing to much the contrast and abuse of Latitude in the mastering  is dangerous if you have not control on all the line of distribution...Is an old problem like the one about Dolby deliver of contents, Dolby always suggest to try to listen at it on a mono low quality loudspeakers before deliver it

[Kisaha]

Last episode was a mess too. 

[Video Hummus]

26 minutes ago, Kisaha said:

Last episode was a mess too. 

Holy hell it was. I only watched to marvel at the rolling train wreck the writers have accomplished. I don’t care about the ending because it’s vapid and stupid. The spectacle is how bad they messed up. It’s not the story.

[androidlad]

7 hours ago, Digitgio said:

My wife follow the series, after she told me about the dark battle (she closed all the windows to watch it) I tried to watch the 3rd episode. Yes is very dark, I think the problem was in the HDR to SDR conversion. Probably watch at it in HDR reference monitor like the Sony 300 (I think the one used in mastering) was very good but in SDR the result is very poor. I don’t know if the SDR conversion is on charge of the broadcasters, in this case is not completely a DOP fault. Aniway he must think  about it, pushing to much the contrast and abuse of Latitude in the mastering  is dangerous if you have not control on all the line of distribution...Is an old problem like the one about Dolby deliver of contents, Dolby always suggest to try to listen at it on a mono low quality loudspeakers before deliver it

Apart from S1, GoT was not mastered in HDR.

[Kisaha]

1 hour ago, Video Hummus said:

Holy hell it was. I only watched to marvel at the rolling train wreck the writers have accomplished. I don’t care about the ending because it’s vapid and stupid. The spectacle is how bad they messed up. It’s not the story.

That's what I was thinking while I was watching. Nothing matters anymore. The spectacle and budget is there, but is empty of soul and stupidly simplified things are happening.

It is interesting to watch the post episode video where Benioff and Weiss are explaining the unexplained. They do not have a clue, they have no reasoning and logic whatsoever, they take decisions depending what they feel like at the moment, to puzzle the viewers a bit and silly such reasons, instead to finalize the thick plot of thousands and thousands of pages.

[darrellcraig]

Season 8 a huge disappointment here as well... i feel like I could skip the last episode and feel no loss. I'll probably watch it  just for the sake of completion - kind of like I did with the 3rd Matrix movie (wow that sucked) and with Walking Dead (I went a couple seasons too long just because and gave up completely a couple of years ago).

I've moved on emotionally from GoT and don't really care about the series wrap. But I still feel the thrill of the first few seasons, wow they were great and the failure of the final season doesn't distract from it.

Good news is that if the books are eventually written, it will create an opportunity to re-do the series or at least redo from where the divergence occurred. Maybe HBO has an option for that... I imagine the financial success of this round all but guarantees someone will put the new books to film.

[Mokara]

On 5/7/2019 at 8:33 AM, SR said:

Just dreadful. Not a fan of her, but Dany deserved better. Her fall into the role of mad queen feels out of nowhere (we had one foreshadowing thus far?). Tyrion seems determined to be useless till the end. Bran's tuned out. And the dialogue was sooo tedious.

She is not being a mad queen, what she is doing is perfectly logical in a medieval ruler mindset. It may not be palatable to modern sensibilities, but rulers in that sort of world were more like mafia bosses than modern state leaders, and you need to think about them from that point of view.  For Daenerys it would have been important to stamp her authority on the situation once it was clear that she had won, since there were competing claims to the throne. She would have wanted to make it VERY clear to anyone who had thoughts of opposing her, or supporting someone else for throne, that SHE was in charge and any opposition would be crushed without mercy. For that a show of force was necessary. In medieval society, kindness and mercy by rulers, especially when they were conquering new territory, was weakness. Making an example of Kings Landing was the correct move to cement her power. No one would dare oppose her after that. Medieval rulers did not look to be loved, they looked for absolute obedience no matter what. Fear, used judiciously, was the tool they used to maintain power, not love.

What the show writers did with her was the correct overall plot line. What was wrong about it was presenting it as an emotional response, when it should have been a more deliberate display of power for the sake of displaying power. This is what ruling is in an absolute monarchy.

[kyleR]

While I agree that TV's should have some sort of built in function to match the intensions of the filmmakers this was a total fail. If I can't see it on my macbook pro what the hell were they thinking? It was a frustrating elitist choice that worked for nearly no one. Shame on the show runners for letting it go out and shame on the DP for not seeing his audience. 

[Video Hummus]

8 hours ago, Mokara said:

She is not being a mad queen, what she is doing is perfectly logical in a medieval ruler mindset. It may not be palatable to modern sensibilities, but rulers in that sort of world were more like mafia bosses than modern state leaders, and you need to think about them from that point of view.  For Daenerys it would have been important to stamp her authority on the situation once it was clear that she had won, since there were competing claims to the throne. She would have wanted to make it VERY clear to anyone who had thoughts of opposing her, or supporting someone else for throne, that SHE was in charge and any opposition would be crushed without mercy. For that a show of force was necessary. In medieval society, kindness and mercy by rulers, especially when they were conquering new territory, was weakness. Making an example of Kings Landing was the correct move to cement her power. No one would dare oppose her after that. Medieval rulers did not look to be loved, they looked for absolute obedience no matter what. Fear, used judiciously, was the tool they used to maintain power, not love.

What the show writers did with her was the correct overall plot line. What was wrong about it was presenting it as an emotional response, when it should have been a more deliberate display of power for the sake of displaying power. This is what ruling is in an absolute monarchy.

But she has done that in the past without burning entire cities and killing thousands of innocents in what was essential demolition porn with the C4 explosive buff Drogon suddenly received.

My biggest gripe is how lazy and sloppy they have been with basic continuity, basic character arcs, and history EVEN INSIDE THEIR OWN SHOW. It’s almost like they forgot what they even wrote in Seasons 1-7.

I have no problem with Dany slipping into madness and killing everyone. I do have problem with the utter lazy, sloppy, convenient writing they did to just get it done. This season was so in effective in getting me to actually care what happens to the characters (something they did so well in past seasons) that it just comes off as almost malicious ineptitude. Especially around the Night King, Jamie, Jon, Dany, the power of the Dragons, and Euron. Oh, Euron!

Euron is perhaps the most weakly, misrepresented character to ever be created. He exists solely to save D&Ds lacks of skill in wiring something compelling, makes sense, and has emotional impact.

”Man, how do we write this to make sense and resonate with the audience.”

”I don’t know man”

”Lets just have Euron teleport in, go all OP, and then peace out cause it’s to hard for us to write something compelling”.

”Awesome Idea!”

Hopefully their work becomes a lesson on NOT what to do in writing stories.

 

[leslie]

On 5/2/2019 at 12:40 AM, SR said:

A lot of complaints of the latest episode being too dark for a lot of viewers. Hopefully not for this crowd. Watching it on my monitor in a darkened room, It wasn't much of a problem. But I can't remember the last time a color grade became the news. I do love the often painterly quality of the light in this show (although I do wish there was a bit more punch with the contrast).

 

 

is this like what happens when you crush the blacks ?