HBO adaptation of Game of Thrones - will this be just for nerds? (NO SPOILERS PLEASE)

Fantasy-hating dismissive reviews make me want to take up my sword >:(
jerks

Yeah, Gukbe's ground rules sound good to me too.

Alan Sepinwall gave it a great review: http://hitfix.com/blogs/whats-alan-watching/posts/review-hbos-game-of-thrones-an-epic-mature-well-crafted-fantasy-series

JESUS, this is starting tonight! For some reason I thought it was next fall.

so excited!

WOOHOOO

HBO doesn't do itunes season passes do they? may have to break my moratorium on bittorrent to watch these without waiting months

yayayayayayaay

I got an invitation from someone who has HBO!!!!!! Pretty excited over here.

No HBO. Gonna try to stream or download it.

lets do this

Started watching but the stream was shut down. So how was it?!

It was good. The story doesn't really start moving along until farther along in the story. This was more just of an introduction. What makes it so good is the characters and what happens to them.

so that was the queen and her brother at the end there?

Yeah. "the things I do for love"

Production was second to none. Great look and sound to this. Having read the book I was also pleased with the storytelling. The one gripe I have is at the end of the episode, which diverges from the book as I remember it. But a minor point.

The sets look great, as was the dialogue. And I had planned on expecting them to change some things in the story line. There is a lot to the story.

The one gripe I have is at the end of the episode, which diverges from the book as I remember it. But a minor point.

― calstars, Sunday, April 17, 2011 10:25 PM (39 minutes ago) Bookmark

Yeah, that was the only change I didn't care for. Otherwise, pretty good.

AV Club review claims this is the weakest of the first six eps.

It's a lot of build up and character introduction, mostly. You get to start seeing the viciousness of some of the characters as it goes along.

Sooooo sad I missed it this week, had prior engagement to see a good friend place music. But I do think I have a place to watch it squared away in the future (with Laurel!) so that is dope as hell.

Pretty good! The only thing for me was all the boobage...I mean, it fit with the story and all but it also felt like they were meeting some kind of HBO quota

Love Dinklage as Tyrion, and <3 Sean Bean as Ned Stark, casting is top notch. Danerys and Drago are so spot on it's kind of scary.

One other small thing is that I wished they'd shown Danerys riding the horse Drago gives her, how much she loves it the way they describe in the book... seemed like a missed opportunity to me?

Sean Bean is great in the role. It's unfortunate that in this and lotr he plays such tragic characters.

He's so good at it though....think that face was pretty much made for it.

It's funny though, every time I see him I sigh a little and say "Oh brave Boromir" lol

It is a very solemn face. To a degree Boromir and Ed Stark are similar characters... both trying to save the kingdom.

sigh swoon noble hero

ok just caught up w/ this, really enjoyed it. it seems as if they're gonna write Theon out of the story completely, which makes sense since iirc he doesn't actually do much until the 3rd or 4th book and even then isn't a crucial character. everything else seemed like it was plotted straight from the book, i didn't catch whatever difference you folks were talking about at the end but i haven't read the books in 6 years so maybe my memory's off.

bran overhears queen and bro talking about their conspiracy, so it's not just that he sees them doing the nasty that gets him pushed out the window, it was that he had knowledge of their plot also

i doubt they're writing Theon out, he just doesn't have much to do in book 1 besides smirk a lot.

re: the ending of the episode, in the book when Bran stumbles onto jaime & cersei he listens in on them for a while and hears about a bunch of ~intrigues~ before watching them bone - i can understand why they cut it out, but i missed it all the same

xp

allmypulp's last two posts seem a little spoilery to me, maybe a mod should edit them? not to be all thread police-y but

I won't argue if they are. But you may want to edit some of the reviews that are listed, since they contain spoilers also.

allmypulp: just understand that there's several people on here watching this who haven't read the books, and this series has a lot of huge out-of-nowhere plot twists so it's particularly prone to spoiler-ruination

That's a good warning! xp

Okay, that's fair. Well I would've liked to more of Theon also. But it is just the first episode which I enjoyed, and am still anticipating the rest.

yeah i don't remember theon doing anything interesting at least until book 2.

(sadface.)

Peter Dinklage is the best.

actually my mistake, it looks like Theon is cast, he just didn't get pointed out yet. wouldn't be surprised if they play down his story anyway though, at least for the first season

Who is Theon I have read book 1 and don't even know who he is

He's Ed Starks ward from an island that rebelled against the king, so he's held as hostage by the Ed Stark under the pretense of being a "ward".

I really wasn't taken with the sex/nudity aspects of the pilot, but there's definitely some promise here. (I'm not familiar with the books at all.)

"it seems as if they're gonna write Theon out of the story completely" -- if they do this i will credit them with a certain amount of nous, i guess? there's like two or three things that you can see would be obvious candidates for streamlining the narrative, and that seems like one of them

likewise glad that it's less clear what bran sees -- that said, i kind of think that even knowing who pushes him out of the window is cack-handed plotting: i mean, it makes the whole arc of the book fairly transparent once you learn (isolated datum which will probably be somewhere in the first six episodes)

re: the slate review - http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/feature/2011/04/16/game_of_thrones_review_of_reviewers - someone on tumblr posted a screengrab of that where every single ad on slate was for this show. er

i kind of want to watch the first episode or so of this, i feel like the combination of it being about elves and shit + apparent shitheap of gratuitous nudity = it will be a hard sell for the other half, i think

also i only want to watch it so i can complain about it on the internet? so i shouldn't bother, probably

I really wasn't taken with the sex/nudity aspects

phrases you rarely see

from that salon article "Patterson is one of the sharpest, funniest TV reviewers out there"

oh plz.

Hating Danaerys as she is cast. That part needs a true Scandanavian ice queen with wisp-fine white-blonde hair and hauteur she can wrap around herself like a cloak to shut out her inside from the outside. Not a cheap bottle job with brown eyebrows and too much blusher.

Everything else otm^10.

wife and i thought the pilot was great btw and we're totally onboard for the time being. so is this supposed to only be six episodes as the opening season (like walking dead) or is it just that reviewers have only seen the first six episode and we're going to have a more 13 episode season. bc it seems that with the cast of characters they've got, and the amount of written content Martin has produced, they could easily write episode after episode of compelling material.

wikipedia says 10 eps

I believe the first season is going to be ten episodes.

Ian! We'll review the first ep next week -- maybe we need to ALWAYS re-watch the prev ep before the new one is on? Makes a nice evening with good company even a bit longer.

Plus I want to AWWWWW at the WOLF PUPPIES again.