So, as I was saying… March has turned out to be really busy for me and has not left a lot of time for blogging. I missed two weeks of posts, which I believe brings my yearly deficit to -3, so I’ve got some work to do to bring that back up. There will need to be a Catch-Up Week with daily posts somewhere just to balance things out.
In the interim, let’s talk the Game of Thrones TV series. It debuted last year and I only managed to catch the first five episodes in full, along with large parts of episodes 8 & 10. I read the book a few years prior, and so didn’t need to wonder how things turned out. For me it was simply the joy of watching the adaptation and I reasoned that leaving a little bit for the eventual blu-ray experience would be enjoyable.
Right I was.
When my blu-rays arrived in the mail, I didn’t have enough time to watch an entire episode, so I let the prologue play through– and never has the snowy expanse beyond the Wall looked so beautiful. The image quality was pristine and nothing more than a reminder of why blu-ray is such a fantastic medium.
And the opening sequence… I daresay one of my favorites, ever. The simultaneous simplicity and complexity of it all blends into a perfect opening, whose maplike nature makes it easy for audiences to keep track of where characters are in relation to each other. That the map updates to include more locales as the series progresses only increases its inventiveness. If you have not seen it yet, here. It’s worth seeing for the wonderful music alone.
So, on the whole, having seen all ten episodes, the series stands as a fantastic adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s book. I think all the critical acclaim it’s garnered in the last year stands as testament to that. There’s little I can add. The thing about Martin that I’ve long admired is his ability to get you completely into the perspectives of his characters. He limits the amount of POV characters in each book to a handful, and those he picks you get to know extremely well.
The HBO series does as good a job as one can expect of translating that deep POV style to the screen– big or small. Some characters remain distant, but that’s because few shows can handle monologues (one of the best I can think of is Burn Notice, but that’s another post). The rest are brought to life.
The Game of Thrones season set is worth getting (especially on blu-ray) if you’re looking for live-action medieval fantasy that is a tad more grounded than the Lord of the Rings movies were (although GoT is a world in which dragons and zombies exist, so… not too grounded, you know). I’m anxious to see how A Clash of Kings will fare with season 2.