A Game of Thrones movie is coming, but how will they woo audiences with the villains? | film

TThere must be a few Game of Thrones fans who have somewhat mixed feelings about the news that Warner Bros. will be bringing the “universe” of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire to the big screen. On the one hand, the prospect of a massive fantasy epic featuring dragons the size of passenger trains is undoubtedly attractive; On the other hand, have they really thought about this?

Reports indicate that the feature film will take as its source the conquest of Aegon Targaryen, who brought the purple-eyed dragon-riding clan to the continent of Westeros (and united six of its seven kingdoms) about 300 years before the events of HBO’s Game of Thrones itself. There’s also a TV series, which will presumably cover much of the same subject matter in more detail. At first glance, this should make even the most reluctant fantasy assistants want to punch the air. After all, Aegon’s invasion is the kind of story for which cinema was invented: dragons blacking out the sky, castles melting like cheese bread under a blowtorch; An entire continent is dramatically turned upside down by a group of platinum-haired dragon lords.

According to Martin himself, in “The Realm of Ice and Fire” (2014) and “Fire and Blood” (2018), the invasion goes roughly as follows: Aegon arrives from Dragonstone with three dragons and demands submission from the kings of Westeros. When many of them refuse, he burns their castles and armies until they surrender. And this, at least according to existing tradition, is pretty much that. The interesting thing about the Targaryens in the Song of Ice and Fire novels is that three centuries of inbreeding and dragon whispering have seemingly turned them into a nest of fragile despots obsessed with giant lizards who would rather burn half the kingdom than share power with anyone. There’s not much in those original texts about what it was, although we can get a pretty good idea. For all intents and purposes, they look like villains.

Let’s imagine for a moment that Star Wars followed a similar path. The original 1977 film would have started out much the same way, with the Empire invading the known galaxy while occasionally pausing to blow up the alien planet. But instead of a ragtag crew of brave rebels, aging space wizards, and grumbling moisture farmers rallying against impossible odds to blow up the Death Star, Vader and company could have moved quickly to secure total dominance of the galaxy thanks to their overwhelming technological, military, and industrial superiority.

In A Song of Ice and Fire, the Targaryens do not triumph because they are brave underdogs or brilliant strategists. They win because they have three massive flying weapons of mass destruction. The moment Aegon appears with Balerion, Vagar, and Meraxes, the entire geopolitical balance in Westeros changes. Perhaps this means that the film will need to perform some fairly heroic feats of narrative gymnastics. Modern audiences generally prefer their heroes to be plucky underdogs rather than a heavily armed dynasty, so the screenplay should find an ingenious way to recast the conquest as a story of heroism rather than imperial expansion. Perhaps Aegon will be portrayed as a reluctant unifier, sighing heavily as he burns yet another medieval stronghold while explaining that he is only doing this for the good of the kingdom. Perhaps one of Westeros’s quietly defeated kings will be reimagined as a cartoonish tyrant, thus turning dragon-assisted conquest into the fantasy equivalent of changing the sacred order.

If that fails, there’s always the time-honored Hollywood solution (see also the recent Lord of the Rings TV show on Amazon) which is to invent an entirely new hero. Perhaps a humble blacksmith’s apprentice who dreams of dragons, or a skeptical courtier who teaches Aegon the true meaning of leadership.

No matter how things turn out, the film has every chance of being a massive cinematic spectacle that delivers some of the most memorable moments Martin has ever dreamed of – but let’s not mess around here, the ending is going to be weird. Because this will essentially be a movie that asks viewers to do something they wouldn’t normally be asked to do in a blockbuster movie: cheer enthusiastically as the evil empire triumphs.