Tag: Emilia Clarke

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Game Of Thrones Ends With A Meditation on the Horrors of War

Drogon is silently judging you.

Game of Thrones was a great show that grew to love the wrong thing. Its early adopters worshipped how it fully realized its alternate universe. Its increasing budget to film battle sequences (off-screen in the manner of a stage play at first) became what its makers thought its true worth. Seduced by the dark side of their production schedule, spectacle became their master, writing their afterthought. Details grew fuzzy, their beautifully constructed dollhouse fell apart, as its audience watched not with desire but light hatred, not in fire but ice.

But even in its death throes, the penultimate episode took time to be true to itself and deflate its heroes. It numbed the viewer with endless shots of medieval civilians running from dragon firebombing by former savior, Daenerys Targaryen. Innocents ran down corridors, caught on fire, and turned to ash. Modeled after U.S. and British massacre of German civilians in Dresden during World War II, it was disgusting. All-powerful ninja Arya and stern-faced warrior Jon Snow ran around helplessly while Daenerys and lieutenant Grey Worm went mad. It may be garbled Cliff Notes for an ending George R.R. Martin may never write, but I’ll hold onto it the way a housecat does a dead mouse: long past the point of usefulness. I loved this show.
[pullquote-1] It is not normal for TV shows to end well, especially sci-fi fantasy. Lost and Battlestar Galactica adopted religious smokescreens for their inability to come up with secular answers to long-posed riddles. Game of Thrones didn’t, completely abandoning the lore of its competing in-universe faiths. Instead, it built to tough-guy nihilism, followed by happy outcomes for the majority of its action heroes and some light Tolkien-style epiloguing. Bran is king, for some reason.

There are many popular theories about why, outside of outpacing their source material, the writing quality of showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss has gone from more thoughtful than most fantasy to exactly as loose and empty as much of it. Cocaine and burnout are solid options, as is a desire to move onto their recently-announced Star Wars trilogy, or the cosmic injustice of a cruel god. I think that, just as they relied on assistant-turned-writer Bryan Cogman for heavy lore lifting in the first seasons, they are relying on a different one now, Dave Hill (who helped elevate the character of Olly), and he’s just not as skilled at helping them craft sturdy plots.

A victorious Daenerys Targaryen addresses her troops in the ruins of King’s Landing.

As many have pointed out, the series dilutes the antiwar message of the novels by its sometimes glorification of the hard-bitten warrior. How cool the Hound looks fighting the Mountain with a dragon flying behind them registered more strongly than his late assertion to mass-murderer Arya that revenge is hollow. (Likewise the online cry of “Cleganebowl!” was initially ironic: people mocked treating a death fight between brothers like an organized sport, until repetition made them sincere). The point shouldn’t be that Daenerys went crazy and killed civilians: it should be that all mass violence leads to noncombatant death, and warriors and states use it far too freely, with increasingly meaningless justification.

Director Miguel Sapochnik and Emilia Clarke did excellent work selling that slaughter. But the lack of characterization in Dany’s turn from a protector of the common people to their mass murderer made the moment nonsensical. Her reasons work when written out: a need to rule by fear, losing advisors and dragons, and numerous surrender bells frustrating or stimulating her bloodlust. Onscreen it creates a disconnect, that does clumsily get the nature of being bombed right. One minute you’re following the propaganda of a government at war, the next you’re being indiscriminately killed. Violence does not resolve character arcs. It just ends you.

Iron Throne? Not so much.

Martin’s ongoing suggestion is that this would happen with any king or queen in the right circumstances. The show’s unfortunate implication is that Dany is worse than her formerly gray, also-murderer co-heroes because she is female, from a foreign land and rides magic lizards. It’s special pleading that the other warriors suddenly care so much about collateral damage.

For the American audience, the use of Dresden as source material is a quiet self-indictment. Your tax dollars prop up one of the most powerful militaries in the world. My favorite show is saying that all war is immoral. If only the comfort and catharsis its audience found in that message could translate into peaceful action by us.

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Game Of Thrones Lives To Fight Another Day

CREDIT: courtesy HBO

courtesy HBO

The Night King (Vladimír Furdík) rides Viserion into battle.

How I feel about my longtime favorite show, Game of Thrones, crystallized recently when I saw a behind-the-scenes promotional video featuring George Lucas’ visit to the set. The show has journeyed from Star Trek to Star Wars, from science fiction carefulness about its worldbuilding to fully realized mythic fantasy. And within that, another movement: from the revelatory appeal of the original trilogy to the bloated nature of the prequels. Showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were adept at adapting George R.R. Martin’s novels, cutting the excess and creating momentum from the morass of detail. But having run out of novels to adapt, they now make up material whole cloth. They favor sudden reveals of plot and character development, twists which pay off simultaneously with half-convincing explanations of how they occurred.

Game Of Thrones Lives To Fight Another Day

Now it’s unclear where characters’ foibles end and where their stupidly for the sake of plot movement begins. The political bickering is nonsensical, the speech less thoughtful and more modern. The pleasures of the show are that of any well-made spectacle. Dragonriders Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) and Jon Snow (Kit Harington) have fallen in love with the all the conviction of bored real estate attorneys in a late afternoon deposition. Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) gets chided for his lack of cleverness, in a retcon of how TV has softened him from the novels, where he is a more murderous and angry drunk. A long-awaited battle has come and gone.
courtesy HBO

Jamie Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Wildu) and Ser Brianne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) prepare for the undead onslaught during the Battle of Winterfell.

Because the second half of this season is yet to air, I cannot say whether these storylines will pull together into a beautiful meditation on all that comes before (online spoilers work like prophecies in the books—vaguely and inconsistently). They still could. I still worship the show even as I criticize it, and spend free time discussing and studying it. But always at my back, I hear my snobbery toward sports. How am I different from a casual football fan? Where the avid sports watcher admires the skill of athlete, I admire the production craftsmen who make this extravaganza. Both are fundamentally passive relationships. The only difference is when the show was better, I was using my brain to work out the mechanics of a fictional world. Now I just receive it, like dictates from the Pope.

The battle between the living and the dead in episode 3 of this season was wonderfully tense. I like director Miguel Sapochnik’s continual stress on the confusion of violence, and how one’s personal narrative gets lost in the chaos of battle. Jon Snow again unheroically flounders through combat. His dragon collides with his lover/aunt’s, foreshadowing what I suspect will be the real conflict post-White Walker. However, that the series’ demonic threat would be defeated in one moment after a single battle with many survivors, felt like a cheat and a mistake.

Criticisms of the episode’s lack of battle geography and dark cinematography miss Game of Thrones’ current strengths. In large setpieces, it gets the feeling of small horrific or supernatural details right. Commenters pointed out that it was an incorrect use of cavalry for the mounted Dothraki to charge into blind darkness and a zombie horde from an opening defensive position, but the visual of soldiers watching their comrades’ fiery swords go out in faraway silence communicated the ebb and flow of hope in a battle. You get the sense of how it feels to be an individual swept up in a mass event.
courtesy HBO

Maisie Williams as Arya Stark

As a fan of this one, sometimes my only recourse to imaginatively engage with a story is to criticize how it fails my expectations. At worst this can be criticism similar to a shoe-buyer complaining about a tight fit: the consumer and his product, in a swan song as their life goes by. But at best the simple act of discussion can engage with communal storytelling, and the ideas stories communicate. Two here are that might makes right, not honor, and that the upper classes focus on increasing their power instead of dealing with threats to the lower classes. I would say this is a general condition of humanity. How can the majority of us be truly free when the powerful always corrupt whatever structure contains them?

Where before describing these ideas was exciting, the show is now something like America’s Most Photographed Barn in Don DeLillo’s White Noise. I can feel the meaninglessness of my voice among the din. But the ritual is a balm, and the central allegory is still there, and still important.

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Solo: A Star Wars Story

In its century long history, Hollywood has produced a handful of characters that have become icons of American manhood. Nick Charles, The Thin Man, was a hard living, but elegant aristocrat. John Wayne’s Ringo Kid from Stagecoach was the archetypal cowboy: laconic, upright, uncomplicated. Rhett Butler was an irresistible scoundrel. Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine was a heartbroken cynic finding his way back to virtue in Casablanca. James Dean’s teenage misfit Jim Stark was the Rebel Without A Cause. Peter Fonda rode a motorcycle named Captain America on an LSD fueled trip in search of his nation’s soul, while Chris Evan’s Captain America was thawed out of the arctic ice to remind us of the better angels of our nature. The 1990s brought us both Will Smith’s wisecracking fighter jock from Independence Day and Tyler Durden, Brad Pitt’s hallucinatory, revolutionary alter ego.

Alden Ehrenreich as Han Solo and Joonas Suotamo as Chewbacca

Then there’s Han Solo. When he first appeared in Star Wars, Harrison Ford was still a part time carpenter. Four years later, when he introduced Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ford was the biggest movie star in the world, and would remain at or near the top of the heap well into the twenty first century. Befitting Lucas’ postmodern pastiche approach to space opera, Solo was a mixture of Rick Blaine’s fractured romanticism, a card playing smuggler like Rhett Butler, a quickdraw gunfighter like Wayne, and unrepentant ladies man like, well, all of them. His ostensible role was to provide a counterweight to Luke Skywalker’s boundless optimism, but he was the one all the boys wanted to be and, when he won the hand of Leia in The Empire Strikes Back, the one all the girls wanted to be with.

Han was the outsized focus of the franchise’s earliest spinoffs. In the 70s and 80s, Luke and Leia got one spinoff novel, Splinter of the Minds Eye. Han Solo and Chewbacca’s adventures filled three volumes, then, in the 2000s, three more. When Disney bought Lucasfilm and started cranking out Star Wars movies on the regular, it was inevitable that Han would take a starring role. It started out promising, when Lawrence Kasdan, the screenwriter for The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark put together a script, but Solo: A Star Wars Story turned into a textbook troubled production when the original directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, were fired after four months of shooting. Lucasfilm honcho Kathleen Kennedy hired Ron Howard to clean up the mess, who was met with howls of derision from the fans. Lord and Miller are comedy directors who, it was hoped, would take Star Wars in a new direction. Howard was a safe choice, a Hollywood veteran with a reputation for unremarkable competence.

Donald Glover as Lando Calrissian

And that’s exactly what Howard brought to Solo. Kasdan, writing with his son Jonathan, constructed a solid series of heists gone wrong, shootouts, and chase scenes. We first meet Han (Alden Ehrenreich) as a street urchin boosting speeders on Corellia. His latest score, a batch of coaxium, a volatile spaceship fuel, is valuable enough to get him and his girlfriend Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke) off planet. But the plan goes quickly wrong, and the pair are separated. Desperate to escape his organized crime pursuers, Solo joins the Imperial Navy, hoping to become a pilot. Three years later, our hero’s washed out of flight school and is fighting with the stormtrooper grunts in the trenches of the swamp planet Mimban when he discovers a crew led by Tobias (Woody Harrelson) in mid-heist, and deserts the army to join the pirate life.

Emilia Clarke as Qi’ra

The problem with Solo does not stem from its chaotic production history. It’s that the star never fills the role. Ehrenreich is upstaged by literally every member of the supporting cast. Clarke’s performance is assured and nuanced, better than most of her work on Game Of Thrones. Woody Harrelson steals every scene he’s in. Donald Glover’s turn as Lando Calrissian is absolute, caped perfection. Even Chewbacca, played by Joonas Suotamo under the tutelage of Peter Mayhew, is more magnetic than Ehrenreich.

To be fair, filling the shoes of Harrison Ford is an impossible task that would have defeated the vast majority of actors. Take it from someone who has to sit through a lot of true crap: this is not a bad movie, and far from a return to the bad old days of Attack Of The Clones. There’s plenty of swashbuckling and primo spaceship action, but also a fair amount of box-checking fan service. The sight of the crystal skull from the tomb of Xim the Despot and Lando’s offhand mention of the Starcave of ThonBoka make my sad little geek heart grow three sizes, but will mean nothing to the casual moviegoer. Howard’s pedestrian direction gets the job done while underlining the greatness of Rian Johnson’s work on The Last Jedi. The bottom line is, Solo is a fun two hours at the movies, while also being an all-too predictable disappointment.

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Me Before You

We begin our story in the women’s restroom of the Paradiso movie theater. I am peeing. I am also listening to the sound of five or six teenage ladies crying — full on, chest-heaving bawling. One of them is angry: “Why would they think that ending was OKAY?!”

I am ashamed to leave the stall. I did not cry at all during Me Without You, the summer’s romantic-tragic blockbuster about assisted suicide. I listlessly examine my ply of toilet paper and ask myself: What’s wrong with me? Am I even human? How did I get here?

Surely, it’s the algorithm’s fault. In bleak mid-winter, I began to see the ads every time I opened my browser. The plot of Me Before You is adeptly summarized by the estimated 18,000 different versions of the trailer, pushed to my smartphone via Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, whatever. Checking my feeds for the past few months has been like walking around wearing a human billboard that reads “EILEEN IS GONNA PAY 11 BUCKS TO SEE THIS SHIT.”

Me Before You starring Emilia Clarke and Sam Claflin

You can learn this much from 30 seconds of nested advertisement: Louisa Clark (Emilia Clarke, or the Mother of Dragons) is a kind, small-town woman with wacky taste in sweaters and few ambitions. She becomes a caretaker for total babe Will Traynor (Sam Claflin), a paraplegic man whose life of wealth and success has been cut short by a spinal cord injury. He has a bad attitude, but Lou brightens it. You can tell when they fall in love because Lou starts wearing sexier outfits. Then we learn that Will has been planning to kill himself. Can her love save his life? Has it saved hers?

There should be an adjective for rom-com movie plots that are just Pride and Prejudice with modern gilding. We could call them Pri-prejudicial. They work off the Austenian premise that when a blank-slate woman meets a rich and smart and inevitably rude man, she can teach him about having a heart. He, in turn, will neg her into a broader understanding of the world.

These Pri-prejudicial plots are usually successful because women like myself pour ourselves onto the shell of a female lead. The fantasy is that we don’t need to offer anything, not even a whole human personality, in order to be loved by a man with limitless hotness and power. We are relieved of the burden of our own growth. When Lou proclaims to Will, “I have become a whole new person because of you,” it reverbs through an echo chamber built inside the hollow husks of a century’s worth of empty women characters.

This is where MBY gets interesting. Spoilers ahead. Instead of the usual ending, MBY kills Will Traynor. He sacrifices himself so that Lou can have a full life. He leaves her a trust fund and instructs her to enjoy herself.

We have our usual all-knowing paternal archetype in Will, a father, boyfriend, and omnipotent God wrapped into one, who teaches Lou to love classical music and watch movies with subtitles. But in order for Lou to fulfill the character growth portended by her sexy mid-movie makeover, the dude has to actually die. We get a Lou, then, that is both the perfect wife/caregiver heroine AND the perfect independent woman. Is this a radical feminist tale in which Lou, mother spider, must eat her husband post-consummation to gain her full power?

It is, at least, a working excuse for why I exited the bathroom and raised an eyebrow at my weeping peers. Toughen up, ladies. We’ve got some men to eat.

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Terminator Genisys

I’m going to risk my film-geek cred by going on record as not hating Arnold Schwarzenegger.

There are a lot of reasons I should hate him: Commando; Kindergarten Cop; Jingle All the Way; Mr. Freeze in Batman & Robin. Not to mention his years as Republican governor of California and his role in popularizing the Hummer as a civilian vehicle.

But there’s something about the guy that makes it impossible for me to banish him to Steven Seagal land. Maybe it’s the fact that he was downright brilliant in two of the best sci-fi/fantasy movies of the 1980s: Conan the Barbarian and The Terminator. Directors John Milius and James Cameron, respectively, knew how to use Schwarzenegger’s impressive physical presence and limited command of English to create their title characters. As his career (and English lessons) advanced, he revealed a self-deprecating sense of humor that his contemporaries Sylvester Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme lacked. In 2015, I find myself intrigued by the prospect of his return as Conan, even though it won’t be in Milius’ long-rumored King Conan script.

But instead of seeing him wear Conan’s Crown of Iron, we got Terminator Genisys.

In these dark times of unnecessary sequels and reboots, Terminator Genisys stands out as particularly unnecessary. The original Terminator was a master class in low-budget exploitation sci-fi made by an acolyte of Roger Corman. The second was a lesson in what happens when a plucky underdog gets a big enough budget to fly a helicopter underneath a viaduct while a semi explodes in the background. Then things just got silly.

Okay, maybe the original premise of The Terminator is pretty silly: Skynet, artificial intelligence spontaneously generated from defense computers, initiates a planet genocide by starting a nuclear war in 1997. Then, 30 years later, when it is on the verge of defeat by a human resistance movement, it sends a robot in the form of Arnie back in time to kill a woman named Sarah Connor, whose son John would grow up to become the general who will defeat Skynet. It was pulpy fun and fairly self-consistent, since Skynet accidentally created its own nemesis when Kyle Reece, the soldier John Connor sent back in time to defend his mother ended up being his father.

But time war is a tricky thing. Once you start violating causation, you’ve opened up a major can of worms. Thor: The Dark World director Alan Taylor tries using Back to the Future, Part II as a template for the story, which sees Kyle Reese, now played by Jai Courtney, traveling back to save Sarah Connor (Game of Thrones‘ Emilia Clarke), only to find that the past ain’t what it used to be. Yet another terminator has been sent even further back into the past to terminate the terminator Reese was supposed to terminate. Who sent it? Nobody knows, but it has something to do with former Doctor Who Matt Smith, who plays yet another, higher-tech terminator that is Skynet made flesh. This is the kind of super-twisty plotting that could, in the hands of a genius science-fiction writer, pay off big time.

Unfortunately, Terminator Genisys doesn’t take its own plot seriously enough to build real tension. Instead, Schwarzenegger occasionally spouts a few lines of half-assed technobabble, and away we go to make bigger booms. Even as the story falls apart, it’s still burdened with leaden exposition. In place of Cameron’s relentless action-inventiveness, we get derivative hackery and callbacks to action sequences that were better staged 25 years ago. Clarke makes a brave run of it as Sarah, but she can’t live up to Linda Hamilton’s iconic heroine, and Courtney is too well-fed and bright-eyed to effectively channel the desperate future soldier Reese.

Watching old Schwarzenegger fight young Schwarzenegger is the best thing about the movie, but unlike Jurassic World, the action sequences aren’t good enough to help the audience ignore the shoddy characterization and indifferent plotting. The whole thing reeks of what it is: a dumbed-down version of a successful product created to exploit the overseas market. You can be forgiven if that gives you a sense of déjà vu.

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Game Of Thrones Season 5

Game of Thrones is about a vampiric government sleepwalking toward impending disaster. Some would say that is why it has captured the zeitgeist. Others would say you just throw money at the zeitgeist and it does what you want. We are the ruled. The exercise of power in our lives — whether by government or corporate house — is something
we receive.

The premiere episode of the fifth season, which aired last Sunday, returns to the subject of obtaining and maintaining power. It’s appealing because the serfs — us — are mainly offscreen. So many of its favored characters are royals or nobles or secret royals. They are born into agency, then according to their respective empathy levels, proceed to brutally or morally pursue change.

Game of Thrones, Season 5

The audience I saw it with was rowdy. They yelled at man ass and gasped at cut throats. They were wearing costumes — I sat near a lovely Tormund Giantsbane and Brienne of Tarth — drank from fake goblets, and ate chicken legs. As the show started its plot machinery for the year, they maybe wanted a little more action, a little more thrill. Instead, it started contemplatively, giving us a childhood witch’s prophecy that fuels the neuroticism of the evil but sympathetic queen Cersei (Lena Headey). Elsewhere, a eunuch warrior went to a brothel in order to be held. Lancel Lannister (Eugene Simon), one of my favorite comic-relief characters, returned with a monk’s tunic and a shaven head, having found consolation in religion. We saw warrior king Mance Rayder’s (Ciarán Hinds) proud bearing ebb away into vulnerability on his way to being burnt at the stake. These tender moments are good.

But couched in that is something sad: doom. This is a nondemocratic world about to crumble into apocalypse. Ice zombies and dragons are closing in on Westeros from either end. There’s tension between the portrayal of medieval realpolitik — what series author George R.R. Martin calls “Aragorn’s tax policy” — and how reassuring a godlike eagle’s eye view of doom can be. The realistic character work and worldbuilding are spiced not only with heavy dollops of fantasy war, titillation, and sex, but the comfort that a corrupt world is explainable because it’s fueled by the Olympian lusts of a powerful few. Order in a crooked universe is preferable to the anarchy without it.

“The future is shit, just like the past,” says Tyrion Lannister on being freed from the crate in which he’s been hiding on an eastbound ship, recounting pushing his literal feces out of holes in the side. The premiere’s director, Michael Slovis, wonderfully shows off his Breaking Bad roots by giving us first-person glimpses of a passing marketplace through those holes. The eunuch Varys tells him he wants to install dragon mother Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) on the Iron Throne to create “Peace. Prosperity. A land where the powerful do not prey on the powerless.” Tyrion answers, “Where the castles are made of gingerbread and the moats are filled with blackberry wine. The powerful have always preyed on the powerless, that’s how they became powerful in the first place.”

Peter Dinklage

This is the bedrock of the show. It soups up its soap opera by making its deaths more realistic and therefore unpredictable. But the emphasis on face-crushing and disemboweling also implies that the world is so brutal it may not be worth sticking your neck out. That’s a defeatist sentiment those of us interested in complex and decadent entertainment may not agree with. It’s the opposite of The Wire, which tried to explain the complex way a social order regenerates itself and traps its participants, who were often dirt poor. Game of Thrones is not revolutionary, even though the horribleness of its hereditary monarchy is a foregone conclusion. You get lost in the details of this lovingly realized, tragic world.

Showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss get better each year at streamlining those details. They have removed Viking pirates, vengeful zombie mothers, and much repetition. But the digressions that strangle Martin’s literary narrative also keep its hopelessness from becoming airtight. Streamlining the world makes it more clockwork in its dourness. The moneyed are further removed from changing things, but they are the only ones who can. This may not be accidental. Martin is a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War from New Jersey. Benioff is the son of the former head of Goldman Sachs.

Tearing down corruption is a hopeful thing. When your dragons breathe fire, you want them to
shine bright.