Winterfell v Helms Deep

There is a lot of mumbling on social media as to which is better; The Battle of Winterfell in Game of Thrones episode The Long Night (S8 E3) or Helm's Deep in Peter Jackson's The Two Towers. Let's compare them.

Obviously, the GoT episode is fresher in my mind and to be fair, I'm still reeling from it. Whilst the early seasons of HBO's series had budgets that meant much of the action took place offscreen, replaced by with talking in tents and then post-battle fields of blood and static extras, The Battle of the Bastards helped nudge the bar higher for large scale medieval combat and yes, I'm including big budget movies here. Even the peerless Ridley Scott's superb work on Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven and Robin Hood were trumped on that flat screen in the corner of my living room.

LOTR and GOT are certainly similar but have many important differences. The most obvious is Thrones' target audience. Whereas The Two Towers was a 12A movie, George R R Martins's stories are hardly that and we are dealing with undead.

Yes, it was dark at the beginning, everyone noticed that and it has launched many a meme already. It was supposed to be -- this is a night-time battle and more importantly an epic zombie attack.

The Two Towers featured opposing armies (albeit one of them were Orcs) laying siege and defending a stronghold, they weren't pretty but they were not undead and it was more of a military conflict, for that reason Helm's Deep is more akin to the Battle of Blackwater than this. The attack on Winterfell owed as much to 28 Days Later and World War Z than the Lord of the Rings trilogy featuring sprightly whites à la Dawn of the Dead remake with its speeded up shufflers (on the subject of Zombie speeds I still like the older 'shuffler' type; They're scary because of their numbers and no matter how fast you are you never outrun them, like Cybermen or Yul Brynner's gunslinger chasing you down corridors in Westworld). When a colossal army of undead advance on a castle you set it at night to make it scary. The dead are more dreadful when they hide in darkness or at least fog but that trope has been done already north of the wall.

The scene where the Dothraki, their weapons ablaze, charge off into the darkness only to be silently snuffed out was a standout for an episode where the enemy was rarely seen until the castle walls were breached. The other reason for keeping things dark was when the dragons breathe their fire on the undead it reinforces their power in bright orange. Everything is lit up better from this point on until the refreshingly intimate sneaking through Winterfell's corridors tones down the brightness.

The first episode of Season 8 had a scene inside the Last Hearth that was played like a 'haunted house' sequence that sent the newspapers in a flap for being 'too dark'. It was only for a couple of minutes and totally justified. We fear the dark and our eyes play tricks on us. I have always found it annoying when night-time is filmed artificially bright with a handy full moon or on a studio stage's colossal lighting rig. Incidentally, did you know that 3D horror movies have to be filmed brightly lit for the 3D optics to work and then have to be artificially graded down to look scary? Years ago my dad used to grumble some of Clint Eastwood's movies were always too dark, not the ones with the Orang-utan, the other ones. Didn't bother me as much I've always liked the contrast of things like Marlon Brando's Colonel Kurtz head appearing out of the shadows in Apocalypse Now. It's about setting the atmosphere and that's phere with an F. But y'know, some people would strip light a ghost train if they could.

Others have said that the jerky camera work and fast cutting meant it was confusing to see who was getting attacked and one person seemed to witness Brienne nearly dying twice. Ever since Gladiator, when Sir Ridders championed the overcranked camera style that is more or less compulsory now this unreal look is in full effect here and it's a fair point. Alien3 suffered from a similar problem at times with everyone running around in the dark, bald and wearing the same clothes, and you have to balance it carefully. But again this was a deliberate choice surely? Everyone watching is expecting a high body count and fearful for their favourite characters and the producers know this and are messing with your heads. The frenetic confusing cuts between the action -- and we have a LOT of protagonists to show remember -- paints the chaos of battle superbly. This isn't the artificial ballet-rehearsed dance of a Jackie Chan Hong Kong fight sequence, this is visceral combat, jittery people desperately fighting for survival and its not pretty.

I like the Lord of the Rings movies. They are breathtaking vast in scope both in front of the camera and in terms of what it took to make them. The standout scene in The Two Towers is rightly the assault on Helm's Deep and it is excellently done, but not without problems. Minor quibbles are the orcs are largely interchangeable and some of the model work when the wall explodes is unconvincing but mainly the tone is uneven and distracts for me. To pacify the censors and no doubt offset the upcoming violence, Gimli and Legolas turn into Laurel and Hardy with their odd out-of-place comedy quips. But for every 'shield used as a surfboard' moment you have the brilliant Aragorn yelling for the same elf to stop a torchbearer before he can light the fuse.

The real problem is that no major character seems to be in any jeopardy. Thousands are killed on both sides and yet in Star Trek parlance they are all 'Red Shirts' and no one cares. At the time of writing at least six characters were killed in the Winterfell massacre with a good few not looking too chipper as the credits rolled. I'm not going to name any names of the deceased in this episode but sudden death has always been one of the trademarks of A Song of Ice And Fire and these very tangible stakes have always been present throughout the story arc and is absent in the Helm's Deep sequence.

In the Middle Earth of Peter Jackson that was lit so perfectly by the late cinematographer Andrew Lesnie, it seems that everyone, not just the Elves, has night vision. I would also like to point out that when they re-teamed for the Hobbit trilogy they used 48 frames per second instead of the standard 24 and they too received similar comments of confusion and dizziness from the press.

Strangely, both end with an almost 'Deux Ex Machina' denouement, whether its Gandalf riding out of the morning sun or thingy killing you know who at the last minute (spoilers!) but that was hinted at for many seasons back.

Much has been talked of Thrones' 11 weeks of consecutive night shoots for this feature-length episode alone and it shows on screen. Not only is there fighting for a solid hour there are multiple narratives with many characters, not just extras, who all have a part to play in the story.

In conclusion, T2T shows the majestic spectacle of war, and GoT shows the terror, the pain and its consequences. Plus it has three dragons kicking the stuffing out of each other. Helm's Deep is great but not today. If you really must put a sword to my head and make me pick a side, I'm #TeamWinterfell