No one is very happy. Which means it's a good compromise, I suppose.

Game of Thrones

Season 8

(SPOILERS) How many TV series that rely on ongoing plotlines – which is most of them these days – have actually arrived at a wholly satisfying conclusion? As in, one that not only surprises but pays off the investment viewers have made over (maybe) seven or eight years? I can think of a few that shocked or dazzled (Angel, The Leftovers) and some that disappointed profoundly (Lost) but most often, they end on an “okay” (reasonably satisfying, if you like) rather than on a spectacular or, conversely, enormously disappointing note. Game of Thrones may not have paid off for many vocal fans who’d accept nothing less than note-perfect rendering of certain key desired developments, but much of the season unfolded in a manner that seemed just the kind of thing I would have expected; not, on the whole, shocking, blind-siding, or (give-or-take) spectacular, but okay, or reasonably satisfying.

These okay results, though, have been an unforgiveable betrayal for some, to the extent of petitioning for the season to be remade (good luck with that) and seemingly failing to recognise that not doing what you’d hope for has been George RR Martin’s modus operandi from the first. So all those so invested in Dany’s symbolic – as a feminist icon, in a show that, per HBO mandates, has been awash with objectifying imagery from the off, ironically only curtailing such behaviour slightly in later, more vilified seasons – rise to power that they failed to pay attention to her abiding ruthlessness and dangerous sense of entitlement, were left stunned by her snap. So on that score, I have little sympathy for the idea that her “turn” needed more of a build-up to make it palatable – it wouldn’t have been as devastating if it could have been seen coming when and where it did, and the show’s remit, at least since Ned had his head chopped off, has been to shock (if that seems a contradiction to my thoughts in the first paragraph, it’s a matter of degrees; that she would turn wasn’t a shock, how she did it could be).

Which is not to say the breathless charge forward of the last two seasons hasn’t resulted in sometimes perfunctory plotting and characterisation. But nothing in Eight seemed remotely on the level of stupidity as Season Seven’s Beyond the Wall. And the slow pace of the first two episodes was welcome, allowing for reunions that, in some cases, we’ve been waiting a batch of seasons for. The perceived disappointment of The Long Night? Well, the mistake would be assuming the Night King was everything to the show in the first place, rather than a convenient device to up the stakes and then dispense with in order to get back to the main thrones-jostling business. That much should have been clear back when his origins were related with borderline flippant casualness in Season Six. And then only compounded by the discovery that, if you Phantom Menace the Night King, all his minions go to sleep.

Certainly, there was a sense of slowly building scenarios and gambits gone adrift once Benioff and Weiss went off books – although the most persistent culprit has been dialogue reduced to the level of the frequently banal; for those who complain about SF or fantasy shows failing to reflecting how people actually speak, this is the price you pay when they do – but there’s also the reality of pushing a boulder up hill and having to allow for its unstoppable momentum once released. Yes, they could frequently have shown more flair and dexterity, and nuance and wit, but relatively few events – that Beyond the Wall episode aside – had me thinking they’d seriously misstepped. The Jon-Dany romance, for example, was never going to take flight once it became clear Emilia Clarke and Kit Harington had zero chemistry (which doesn’t rely on being the greatest thesps ever, so that wasn’t the issue), so spending as little time as possible on it was the only sensible decision.

There’s Tyrion, of course, characterised as the brightest of the bright but in the last couple of seasons progressively made to look like he’s going to out-lap Jon Snow in the “you know nothing” stakes (ending up in the Winterfell crypt being maybe the worst indignity to his faculties). How he managed to turn events around in The Iron Throne is a mystery only the writers can truly answer (the same with Grey Worm having the restraint not to kill Jon as soon as he discovered what the latter had done; that they left this off screen speaks volumes). The council meeting certainly wasn’t the writers’ finest hour; if the choice of Bran as king (shouldn’t his first edict have been to stop anyone calling him “the Broken”?) satisfied in terms of arriving at someone not at least partially objectionable (and his “foreseen it all” element had an appealing touch of manipulation, whatever his nobler designs may be), he still manages to allow himself to be instantly undermined by stroppy Sansa before he’s even begun his reign.

I can’t say any of the season’s deaths had an enormous impact, since most of those exiting seemed to have run their course. Sir Jorah being faithful to the last, the inevitable clash of brothers seeing Glegane’s demise, and Cersei and Jamie buried under some rubble. I liked the undercutting of the latter, but could have done without the Jamie vs Euron fight (I could have done without Euron full stop); part of the problem Cersei has encountered is that, since her walk of shame, she’s had scant interesting plotlines, and during this final season in particular she just waited around for others to do all the doing. Actually, Varys’ demise was sad, and quite touching (Tyrion shops him but still offers a comforting hand), and nice that they remembered to give him a decent episode in The Last of the Starks (again, after a couple of seasons forgetting about him).

As for the survivors, the reveal of the members of the Small Council is entirely too neat, the sort of thing Joss Whedon would come up with, where everyone we know now has a position of importance regardless of suitability. Jon heading off beyond the Wall with Ghost and Tormund seemed fitting, as does Anya – the most engaging character of the season by far – setting off solo, hoping the producers don’t give her a spinoff, or that at very least George RR has plotted it in its entirety first if they do.

Far from Season Eight being the worst of the run and the retroactively ruining the entire show, I’d rate it ahead of both Five and Seven. Only the fourth and final episodes featured elements that fell below par, and they were still largely engrossing. The prize goes to the one that provoked the most gnashing of teeth, though, Dany’s holocaust hour in The Bells. As zeitgeist-seizing series go, Game of Thrones was blessed to avoid the kind of fate that befell Lost or Battlestar Galatica, where acceptance or denial come the finale was based on how well received the answers (or otherwise) to the mysteries were. Game of Thrones had no secrets left to unveil, save the fates of its characters, not that this staunched fan theorising in exactly the same manner of those preceding shows. Indeed, the biggest reveal came about three seasons back; that Benioff and Weiss’s legacy would be exposing as pulp a series that had hoodwinked viewers into believing it was adapting great literature. With such credentials, they’re probably ideally poised for their forthcoming Star Wars trilogy.

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

Comments

Poor Easy Breezy.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)
(SPOILERS) My initial reaction to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood was mild disbelief that Tarantino managed to hoodwink studios into coming begging to make it, so wilfully perverse is it in disregarding any standard expectations of narrative or plotting. Then I remembered that studios, or studios that aren’t Disney, are desperate for product, and more especially, product that might guarantee them a hit. Quentin’s latest appears to be that, but whether it’s a sufficient one to justify the expense of his absurd vanity project remains to be seen.

You're waterboarding me.

The Upside (2017)
(SPOILERS) The list of US remakes of foreign-language films really ought to be considered a hiding to nothing, given the ratio of flops to unqualified successes. There’s always that chance, though, of a proven property (elsewhere) hitting the jackpot, and every exec hopes, in the case of French originals, for another The Birdcage, Three Men and a Baby, True Lies or Down and Out in Beverly Hills. Even a Nine Months, Sommersby or Unfaithful will do. Rather than EdTV. Or Sorcerer. Or Eye of the Beholder. Or Brick Mansions. Or Chloe. Or Intersection (Richard Gere is clearly a Francophile). Or Just Visiting. Or The Man with One Red Shoe. Or Mixed Nuts. Or Original Sin. Or Oscar. Or Point of No Return. Or Quick Change. Or Return to Paradise. Or Under Suspicion. Or Wicker Park. Or Father’s Day.

What about the meaningless line of indifference?

The Lion King (2019)
(SPOILERS) And so the Disney “live-action” remake train thunders on regardless (I wonder how long the live-action claim would last if there was a slim hope of a Best Animated Feature Oscar nod?) I know I keep repeating myself, but the early ‘90s Disney animation renaissance didn’t mean very much to me; I found their pictures during that period fine, but none of them blew me away as they did critics and audiences generally. As such, I have scant nostalgia to bring to bear on the prospect of a remake, which I’m sure can work both ways. Aladdin proved to be a lot of fun. Beauty and the Beast entirely tepid. The Lion King, well, it isn’t a badfilm, but it’s wearying its slavish respectfulness towards the original and so diligent in doing it justice, you’d think it was some kind of religious artefact. As a result, it is, ironically, for the most part, dramatically dead in the water.

You know what I think? I think he just wants to see one cook up close.

The Green Mile (1999)
(SPOILERS) There’s something very satisfying about the unhurried confidence of the storytelling in Frank Darabont’s two prison-set Stephen King adaptations (I’m less beholden to supermarket sweep The Mist); it’s sure, measured and precise, certain that the journey you’re being take on justifies the (indulgent) time spent, without the need for flashy visuals or ornate twists (the twists there are feel entirely germane – with a notable exception – as if they could only be that way). But. The Green Mile has rightly come under scrutiny for its reliance on – or to be more precise, building its foundation on – the “Magical Negro” trope, served with a mild sprinkling of idiot savant (so in respect of the latter, a Best Supporting Actor nomination was virtually guaranteed). One might argue that Stephen King’s magical realist narrative flourishes well-worn narrative ploys and characterisations at every stage – such that John Coffey’s initials are announcement enough of his …

She writes Twilight fan fiction.

Vampire Academy (2014)
My willingness to give writer Daniel Waters some slack on the grounds of early glories sometimes pays off (Sex and Death 101) and sometimes, as with this messy and indistinct Young Adult adaptation, it doesn’t. If Vampire Academy plods along as a less than innovative smart-mouthed Buffy rip-off that might be because, if you added vampires to Heathers, you would probably get something not so far from the world of Joss Whedon. Unfortunately inspiration is a low ebb throughout, not helped any by tepid direction from Daniel’s sometimes-reliable brother Mark and a couple of hopelessly plankish leads who do their best to dampen down any wit that occasionally attempts to surface.

I can only presume there’s a never-ending pile of Young Adult fiction poised for big screen failure, all of it comprising multi-novel storylines just begging for a moment in the Sun. Every time an adaptation crashes and burns (and the odds are that they will) another one rises, hydra-like, hoping…

What you do is very baller. You're very anarchist.

Lady Bird (2017)
(SPOILERS) You can see the Noah Baumbach influence on Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut, with whom she collaborated on Frances Ha; an intimate, lo-fi, post-Woody Allen (as in, post-feted, respected Woody Allen) dramedy canvas that has traditionally been the New Yorker’s milieu. But as an adopted, spiritual New Yorker, I suspect Gerwig honourably qualifies, even as Lady Bird is a love letter/ nostalgia trip to her home city of Sacramento.

My name is Dr. King Schultz, this is my valet, Django, and these are our horses, Fritz, and Tony.

Django Unchained (2012)
(MINOR SPOILERS) Since the painful misstep of Grindhouse/Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino has regained the higher ground like never before. Pulp Fiction, his previous commercial and critical peak, has been at very least equalled by the back-to-back hits of Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. Having been underwhelmed by his post Pulp Fiction efforts (albeit, I admired his technical advances as a director in Kill Bill), I was pleasantly surprised by Inglourious Basterds. It was no work of genius (so not Pulp Fiction) by any means, but there was a gleeful irreverence in its treatment of history and even to the nominal heroic status of its titular protagonists. Tonally, it was a good fit for the director’s “cool” aesthetic. As a purveyor of postmodern pastiche, where the surface level is the subtext, in some ways he was operating at his zenith. Django Unchained is a retreat from that position, the director caught in the tug between his all-important aesthetic pr…

Do you read Sutter Cane?

In the Mouth of Madness (1994)
(SPOILERS) The concluding chapter of John Carpenter’s unofficial Apocalypse Trilogy (preceded by The Thing and Prince of Darkness) is also, sadly, his last great movie. Indeed, it stands apart in the qualitative wilderness that beset him during the ‘90s (not for want of output). Michael De Luca’s screenplay had been doing the rounds since the ‘80s, even turned down by Carpenter at one point, and it proves ideal fodder for the director, bringing out the best in him. Even cinematographer Gary K Kibbe seems inspired enough to rise to the occasion. It could do without the chugging rawk soundtrack, perhaps, but then, that was increasingly where Carpenter’s interests resided (as opposed to making decent movies).

Kindly behove me no ill behoves!

The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990)
(SPOILERS) It’s often the case that industry-shaking flops aren’t nearly the travesties they appeared to be before the dust had settled, and so it is with The Bonfire of the Vanities. The adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s ultra-cynical bestseller is still the largely toothless, apologetically broad-brush comedy – I’d hesitate to call it a satire in its reconfigured form – it was when first savaged by critics nearly thirty years ago, but taken for what it is, that is, removed from the long shadow of Wolfe’s novel, it’s actually fairly serviceable star-stuffed affair that doesn’t seem so woefully different to any number of rather blunt-edged comedies of the era.

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The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
(SPOILERS) The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and other tall tales of the American frontier is the title of "the book" from which the Coen brothers' latest derives, and so announces itself as fiction up front as heavily as Fargo purported to be based on a true story. In the world of the portmanteau western – has there even been one before? – theme and content aren't really all that distinct from the more familiar horror collection, and as such, these six tales rely on sudden twists or reveals, most of them revolving around death. And inevitably with the anthology, some tall tales are stronger than other tall tales, the former dutifully taking up the slack.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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