Game of Thrones: A Tale of Kings and Honor

This edit is astounding in that it collapsed so much complicated narrative into a less than 3 hour film. I'm shocked that it even worked, and even more impressed that it worked as well as it did.

Looked good on my 4k TV, I noticed a couple of pixelated spots which may or may not have been Plex related, so YMMV. Sounded good on my surround sound as well.

There are some choices made as far as what to cut, when to cut that I personally don't agree with, but none of it is done poorly. A lot of it will come down to your taste, and what you enjoy about the show.

My biggest grip is the new music. It just doesn't fit to me, especially given that the show has so much fantastic music. I'd honestly put the Game of Thrones score up there on par with Howard Shore's LOTR work. The music is also part of the personality of the show, just like Star Wars' music is part of what makes it so great. I'm a little puzzled by the decision to use different music, as it seems like it would be a lot of work to replace the music of the entire edit. Again, a personal opinion, so can't fault you for it.

Overall this is a truly impressive edit, and great for those that want to "watch" the season without devoting 10 hours to it. I'd be curious to see how it plays to someone that's never seen the show before.

Wow! Now I can see what people go on about without having to spend ten hours per season on it. Great job with the editing, it was all seamless. Its the perfect edit for those of us who dont want to spend the time watching the tv show.

Very well done. I love how the LOTR music was used. Except for a few very recognizable cues, I lost track of the fact that it was music from LOTR and not the original GOT soundtrack. Great work there.

This could have, perhaps, been a little longer to keep a few important narrative and character development ideas, but as this is the first of hopefully several more, I imagine there were some lessons learned on this one.

As others have mentioned, there are several spots where the video pixelates. I thought maybe I'd gotten a corrupted download, but seems not the case. I hope this can be corrected in a Version 2.0.

All that said, I greatly enjoyed watching this. It was a good "Reader's Digest" version of Season 1.

I first off want to say that I highly enjoyed this edit, and I can really see the amount of work and passion which went into making it. The Lord of the Rings soundtrack fits very well, and the opening at the start is extremely well put together and reminiscent of those films. This edit achieved what it was meant to accomplish, to convert season 1 of Game of Thrones into a feature film reminiscent of LOTR, and for that matter alone, I would recommend this edit for people who are fans of the series and the movies.

But does this film manage to capture the full essence of Game of Thrones into 2 and a half hours? I'm afraid I can't say so, and I can't recommend this edit for people who haven't seen the series.

In our day and age, television serials are at the height of their artistic merit. Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones... all of these shows are staples of the times we live in and deserve to be shown to future generations, just as great cinema such as the Godfather and Citizen Kane has been passed on to us. But here poses a problem: the hours needed to put into these shows is so much, and so much of them are being produced, it is impossible to keep up with it all, and nobody is going to be able to watch every major show, which could leave them being forgotten for newer shows because people can't put in the many hours, unlike a movie which only takes 2-3 hours of the person's time.

So what intrigued me about this edit was: is it possible to condense Game of Thrones into a series of films? So that people may more easily find the time to experience it.

If you read about the development of the Game of Thrones series, the initial proposal was to make it into a series of films. But doing so would have been very difficult as there was simply so much to film, as a single volume of one of the GoT books is equal in magnitude to the entirety of Lord of the Rings. To make a film, you would have had to have focused on one story, instead of the multiple stories within the series.

And this, I think is where this edit fails. It tries to show us all three stories within Season 1: Ned, Daenerys, and Jon. But because Andreas wants to condense all of those stories... all three of them seem very unfulfilling compared to the series.

Now, of course things need to be cut for time, and for the first half hour or so into the film I was thinking 'god, this works really well.' You cut out bits that needed to be cut whilst keeping a good pace and still having the same degree of depth to the characters. However, once you cut out the whole subplot with Arya, Sansa, and Joffrey, the story was seriously weakened, and it went downhill from there. It harms the development of these characters, and indeed of Ned (his interactions with Arya and how he views the death of the Butcher's son to me show Ned at his absolute best, and make him so much more relatable in a world where inequality is so embedded.) Andreas presumably cut this to focus on Daenerys and her story, but I think personally that was too much for a film to chew. It loses focus, and feels very disconnected. With Daenerys, her character really suffers because she goes from being extremely shy to suddenly this badass. With lots of Ned cut out, we don't get the strong moral compass present in season 1 making this strange universe seem more human and relatable. It feels over-saturated, with lots of plot points, and we don't get to focus on the characters which to me is what makes GoT so good.

I think you should have cut all of Daenerys out, and used all the available time to focus on the Stark family and Ned's investigation of the heritage of the Royal children, with Dany only mentioned by characters in Kings Landing. You cutting the whole plot with Robb and Ned disagreeing over how to deal with Dany, makes the whole rest of the plot seem disjointed: 'why would Jamie just attack Ned if he is still hand of the king?'... You also change the order of scenes with Robbs death and Ned telling Cersei and it just completely changes the story and the characters. In order to convert GoT season 1 into a film, I think you need to keep it on the Starks, otherwise we lose the narrative.

I know I've spent loads of time criticising this edit but I still really enjoyed it. I love the soundtrack to LOTR and hearing that with GoT just gave me chills. It's just that I don't think it stands up well as a film in its own right, only as an artistic mash up.

Some people have pointed out that it does pixel-late at points and that should be sorted out. Other than that, the general presentation quality of this edit was fantastic. Good work!

TV-to-movie edits are tough. It's really easy to take a 10 hour TV season and make a 4 hour TV season. What's difficult is taking a 10 hour season and making a proper 2.5 hour movie. In that sense, this edit passes with flying colours. There's another edit of season one that didn't do a good job with the narrative but this is on another level. This is a gripping story with all the right elements. The opening is genius and it flows like a proper movie. The only bad thing I can say about the narrative is that it's not a self-contained story and relies on the fact that sequels are coming. But that's a minor quibble because you'll definitely want to watch the sequel right after this anyway.

The picture quality is great and the addition of the LOTR score is a great bonus. But there's a serious issue with this edit in that there about a dozen or so spots where the picture becomes very pixelated for a few seconds. It's bad enough that it takes you out of the movie and the editor really should have corrected this before releasing it. Were it not for that, this would easily be a 9 or 10 out of 10, but as it stands now, I can't recommend this edit. The editor should really take another shot at this because the narrative is so good that it deserves a release without technical issues.