That was so silly looking I started laughing. I'm sorry but no matter how cool other parts of the scene were, that goofiness drags it down. I thought it would look less embarrassing on HBO as opposed to the leaked version but I was wrong. It was still ridiculous and cheap looking.
I know this show has a lot of fans who blindly worship it but how are people able to ignore how stupid that looked?
Let's put it this way: it looked far better than the kid riding the dragon in The Neverending Story.
shareSo you're saying the bar was set low?
shareFirst, I'm trying to make it look like the Ep 4 scene can be described as a "the glass is half full" kind of thing, shameless GoT sophist that I am. Second, I love fantasy, but don't recall any dragon-riding scenes other than these two and the stuff in Aragon. Nothing in Dragonheart, Reign of Fire or that thing with Peter Macnicol in it. I don't believe there's been a film made of any of Ann McCaffery's Dragonriders of Pern series; so I think Danny-upon-Drogon is the state of the art so far. Do I wish it had been better? Yes, but I suspect there are technical reasons why it was not.
shareCan anyone specify exactly how the dragon-riding could have been better? It wasn't detailed, and there were several shots of teeny Danerys sitting on a little bit of dragon, what else do you want? The dragon-riding wasn't the most important thing about that scene, the dragon's effect on the Lannister army was.
Anyway, IMHO the best dragon-riding scenes ever put on film were in the animated "How To Train Your Dragon". They completely got across the unexpected joy of flight, the thrill of shooting into the stratosphere and dodging past obstacles at high speed, and the joy of bonding with another living being. However, there isn't room to explore any of that during A BATTLE. They made an AWESOME battle, and one of the things that made it work was that the dragon was mostly shown from the POV of the Lannister army, the ones who were wetting their pants with terror at the sight.