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You clowns are making way too much of this whole "murkiness" non-issue.
The name of the freakin' episode is "The Long Night" for chrissakes!
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Posted: |
May 2, 2019 - 2:57 PM
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By: |
TominAtl
(Member)
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You clowns are making way too much of this whole "murkiness" non-issue.
The name of the freakin' episode is "The Long Night" for chrissakes!
Geeze, tell me about it.
I initially watched on a much newer set at a friends house, a 70" Sony and yes, it did look like shit. Why? Because he didn't both to take the time to do...what? Calibrate and adjust! Huge difference. I then went home and immediately re-watched it and I had no issues on my set, a 3 year old LG 60" LCD set. I looked fine! Dark, yes. gloomy, yes. "Fog of war" style setting and photography, yes.
So it could very well be that many viewers, for years, may have been watching shows on their big screens right out of the box thinking that's the way it should be. And then a show that is photographed to push the boundaries didn't measure up to everyone's expectations or approval.
And also, given the years of build up and the 2 previous episodes so called delay, it was inevitable that last Sunday nights episode was not going to live up to the hype period, much less the much vaunted "Battle of the Bastards" episode. And I will grant it that it did not, but hardly anything could or will.
All I know is that I watched it with 2 other friends and when the Dothraki charged and then got snuffed out, it was white knuckled experience all the way through the rest of the show.
No, it was not a perfect episode but they went for the gusto on this episode and I enjoyed every min of it.
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Clowns?? What, because some of us thought it was too dark n murky and difficult to follow what was happening? Well, it was.
I dont have a 7k supersonic bionic 400inch tv thats been adjusted by an electrician from nasa - but i have saved the episode to watch it again and see if more clarity can be gleaned from a revisit.
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Re: Season 8, Episode 3 "The Long Night"
I thought the buildup sequences at the beginning were suspenseful. Melisandre, the Red Woman, drops in at the very start, as I suspected she would, to give the flame of the Lord of Light to the Dothraki arakhs. Nice bit of spectacle. Then, the Dothraki cavalry charge, and...
I've always complimented Messrs. Benioff and Weiss for their clever poaching of other war spectacles in the past, such as The Battleship Potemkin and Apocalypse Now. This battle seemed to have more of Alexander Nevsky as a provenance. Nevsky's army clashing with the Mongols on a frozen lake being very like the furious charges we saw between the forces in this battle.
And with due credit to Zack Snyder, who gave us the "innovation" of the ADHD Zombie in his re-make of Dawn of the Dead, these un-dead foot soldiers (wights, they are known as.) really get down in the heat of battle, don't they? This accounts for a lot of the perceptual confusion in these combat montages that everyone is complaining of; first, you've got the darkness, then the hyperactive undead, then--moreover--the fact that everyone's "screening gear" is two-or-three generations behind the uber-digital production that ties it all together and, voila, you get a perfect inadvertent pressure campaign from HBO for getting a new TV.
After our first line of protagonists have tasted blood (Ser Jorah, Ser Jaime, Ser Brienne.) comes the second wave, with Grey Worm and Daenerys' Unsullied legions readying behind the trench in front of the Winterfell gates. As the un-dead charge, a fine bit of suspense with the Red Woman imploring the Lord of Light to strike fire in the trench, and a just-in-time ignition.
Below, in the Winterfell crypts, Sansa and Tyrion get a testy response from Missandei when they carelessly toss around their doubts as to whether the Dragon Queen will be an unalloyed force for good if they should all survive the battle. Varys also stays in the crypt; and my greatest hope for Game of Thrones is that, in these upcoming last three episodes, we'll get a some of the canny treachery that he and Tyrion have dealt to their opponents in past seasons of the show.
Lots of stuff with the un-dead stalking Arya. This set-piece got all Speilberg-ian, but it was effective enough, with our first notable battle death, the Lightning Lord, Beric Donderrion, buying the Hound and Arya enough time to escape, using his own body to block the passage and being inundated with stabby, stabby wights.
By this time, Jon and Daenerys have seen all they need from their ridgetop observation post to mount their dragons and get into battle. But immediately, a complication! One of the creepiest things about the appearance of the Others in the novel are the sudden, drastic envelopments of Arctic cold and/or inclement weather that accompany their manifestations on the human plane of existence. The middle of this battle is the perfect time to encounter this; and to do so in mid-air makes it all the more creepy, just as you're getting your hackles up for the good-guy dragons to rip it up.
...and rip they do. The mid-air dragon combat certainly provides us the CGI highlights of the episode. A word here about the 1981 film Dragonslayer, which many on the FSM boards will remember for its stellar score by Alex North (with a great performance from the National Philharmonic Orchestra of London to boot!). This sequence with Jon, Daenerys and the Ice Dragon in-combat-in-flight is replete with visuals "inspired by" Dragonslayer, most directly the two interludes when one dragon-rider or the other soars above the cloud tops to be lit by a perfect moonlight, a poetic contrast to the chaos below.
The titular dragon antagonist of Dragonslayer, Vermithrax Pejarotive, was one of the finest stop-motion creations of its time, rendered (if I recall correctly) by Phil Tippett and the Industrial Light & Magic bunch to great effect when combined with the superb matte work and paintings of aerial visuals whose realism made the dragon effects that much more convincing. In 2019, with high-definition creation and compositing techniques, we get one-on-one dragon combat, grappling with each other while plummeting mid-air. A real rush for us cinema dragon fans from nearly forty years back.
Back to the battle at Winterfell, did any of you really think any of the show's top line cast was going to bite it in this battle? I certainly thought the showrunners would toy with the idea. Using past show battles as a guide, it's standard Game of Thrones order of battle to make the viewer think the battle is lost...before it isn't. So, I'm personally glad that the creators didn't insult us with too much agony over lost good guys and stuck to the suspense and the spectacle (a lesson the makers of Avengers: Endgame would have done well to remember, but they didn't.)
The un-dead are now infesting Winterfell like termites, chaos and blood and fire and debris everywhere, with one of Deanerys' dragons acquiring stabby wights like ticks when she unwisely lands and dismounts in a futile attempt to assist Ser Jorah Mormont in the courtyard chaos. Another stellar sequence as the dragon takes flight in the attempt to shake its attackers. Some claim that both of Daenerys' dragons survived this battle; I'm not so sure.
To the final stand in the godswood, Ser Jorah has expired in the last ditch stand to fend the wights off the Khaleesi, Theon Greyjoy dies nobly as the White Walker elite move into Brandon Stark's redoubt, the Night King poises to strike...and then Arya Stark zooms from out of the background murk to deliver justice to whatever these things are by felling the Night King with what I think is the dragonglass point of her spear weapon that Gendry fashioned for her just before the battle.
With that, the Night King disintegrates, and all his charges, fellow White Walkers, wights, and Ice Dragon all disintegrate or expire. Now, as to the ultimate origin and purpose of these malignant beings from another plane, I have not the slightest idea. Back in, I believe, season six, before Brandon Stark and his companions make their escape from the wight attack in the lair of the Three-Eyed Raven, his friend of the Children of the Forest explains to him after one of his visions that the White Walkers/The Others were a magical creation of the Children of the Forest: "We were being destroyed. We had to do something". This implies that, being the first humanlike beings in Westeros, the arrival of The First Men in Westeros had brought some kind of genocide to the Children of the Forest, and the Others were the only way they could fight back. I leave it to George R.R. Martin to provide an explanation for all that in The Winds of Winter and beyond.
Good Luck George!
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Re: Season 8, Episode 3 "The Long Night"
I found I'd garbled some details after a second viewing of this. I also didn't remember or misremembered a couple of key moments that I think'll be germaine to how the series plays out. There's just so much shit in this episode, It's impossible to keep it all straight, but here goes...
Jon and Daenerys join the battle early, when the wights first hit the Winterfell barricades. It's easy to forget that, at a guess, easily a third to a half of the wight foot soldiers get wiped out in the sweeps of dragonfire.
The interlude in the crypts with Tyrion and Sansa leads to an estimation by Sansa that things couldn't work with her and Tyrion because of his position as Daenerys' Hand of the Queen. I'm not sure what Daenerys' retainer, Missandei, is so piqued about. I don't think she has the full story on the history of these characters the same way we do.
Nice touch with the wights plugging the fire trench so their fellow wights can get through. Good chaotic stuff after the breakthrough, with the Hound retreating in fear from the fire, only to rejoin the battle when Arya is in peril.
Easily the best scare of the episode for me was when the Ice Dragon spews blue fire unexpectedly from underneath Jon and Daenerys. The cloud-top interludes feature both good dragons and, in the crescent moonlight, especially when Jon and Daenerys get a medium shot on dragonback, It really reminds me of Vermithrax Pejarotive and Dragonslayer, though Vermithrax was not the kind of dragon to be ridden for the sake of a human.
I had thought that the scene with Melisandre and Arya might have some clue to how Arya would be used in the final conflict against Cersei, but I was wrong. The grappling of Jon's dragon and the Ice Dragon above the Winterfell godswood was most fine in a very Ray Harryhausen way, with Daenerys dislodging the Night King to end the mid-air combat.
What I missed most of all was the fact that, as Jon is pursuing the Night King towards Winterfell, the great remaining mass of the wight foot soldiers are kaput, only to be reactivated (with all the human battle casualties) as the Night King resurrects them to ward off Jon. The battle had not been won by the human side at that point, but became impossible after this mass resurrection.
It's then that Daenerys commits the tactical error of landing her dragon after fire-sweeping the wights immediately meanacing Jon. I'm still not sure whether Daenerys' dragon survived being infested with all the stabby wights. Nice sound work with the dragon croaking and squealing as it gets overrun, and the corpse soldiers falling from the air with splats to menace Daenerys.
The only thing left for me to wonder about is what significance the Red Woman, Melisandre, might hold in death. In the aftermath of the battle, in the dawn, she moves out of the Winterfell gates, past the piles of corpses, removes her magic gemstone from around her neck (her glamor, as it is called in the books.) lets her robe slip off and, at a distance from the viewer, expires in front of the castle.
I've always suspected that Melisandre might be Lyanna Stark in a Red Priestess guise. Who knows? And, in a sense, who cares? It's on now to the real villain of the show, Cersei, and man do I hope she gets what's coming to her. Nothing matters compared with that!
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I just rewatched the murky fog of war episode.
It was better with the lights off in the room.
The same sequences were un-followable (if thats not a word it should be) such as the dragon fight.
One thing i did see was that when jon snow stumbles back into the castle hunting the night king - along with Brienne and jamie fighting undead hordes but still alive - he also goes past greyworm, tarly, robert's bastard (dont know his name) and i think giantsbane all swinging at zombies in a frenzy.
Sir Davos and the red witch emerged in the aftermath - (rather a waste that she wandered off and died, apart from the fact i fancied her!) And of course the Hound, who must be saved so that he can go toe to toe and carve up his brother the Mountain at some point - that heavyweight clash certainly will be the thrilla in manila - and im expecting the mountain to die and the hound to last only long enough for a touching scene with arya before he succumbs to his wounds. Thats my prediction anyway.
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Ep4 was interesting.
Spoilers
Always going to be a bit of slower episode after last week's action-fest.
The aftermath of the battle and the celebrations were always going to be needed at the start. I do rather think that the tension between sansa and daenerys is a bit contrived. In reality the battle they had just come thru v the dead they would all bond - and loathing of cersei should be more than enough to concentrate minds. Petty bickering wouldnt be on the agenda.
There was always going to be a moment when the crossbows fired unannounced on a dragon but until the dragons were flying to the castle i didnt expect it to be so soon. Once again daenerys n jons forces get outfoxed - you do kinda wonder that no one is saying hang on, what might cersei be up to?. Where might she move her fleet, army etc , what weapons might she have?. At the moment its looking like daenerys is gonna lose the dothraki n unsullied and both dragons n get killed before jon's army arrives.
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Xebec:The best characters got killed!
Missandei is not one of the best characters. Theon Greyjoy and Ser Jorah Mormont, yeah, but not Missandei.
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I watched the third episode just now. It sparkling sunlight here in Norway. Even with my blinders shut, and a dark towel in front of them, I could hardly make out anything. Guess I'll rewatch it tonight, with the brightness turned all the way up. 
Yeah I was ' forced' to.watch in daylight also.
That.is why I will never abandon. my Panasonic flat screen. standard cathode ray monitor. No reflect3. You can watch it in daylight unlike those stinkin flat screen is monitors.
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So there you have it. A medieval series watched on a Star Wars tv.
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I wonder how Cersei's horizontal crossbows will do wen the dragon dives down at them vertically from above the castle in the night - delivering a packet of dragon napalm before anyone knows he's there. Frying tonight - I love the smell of burning lannisters in the morning.
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