Regardless of how you feel about the ending of Game of Thrones or the final season in general, you can’t deny what a monumental achievement the series is. No one had ever tried something like it before. The eighth and final season alone cost approximately $90 million. Of course, HBO can afford to spend more money than other networks because of its subscriber base. As HBO itself says, “It’s Not TV. It’s HBO.” Still, to tell such an expansive story in a weekly series is impressive. Game of Thrones will go down as the defining show of the 2010s.
A episode of television might only be an hour (longer in this season’s case), but hours upon hours of hard work goes into an episode. If Game of Thrones: The Last Watch is effective in anything, it’s in portraying just how long the production really took. Sets took months to build. The crew put in 18-hour days and director Miguel Sapochnik had to go off of three hours of sleep.
While the two-hour runtime of Game of Thrones: The Last Watch does drive home the lengthy process, it also means the documentary moves along at a snail’s pace. Again, this is very true to the real experience; so much time in TV and movie production is spent on set up. However, this makes the documentary less than entertaining.
What The Last Watch is really missing is insights into how the crew pulled off certain things. You don’t learn about anything like the rotating hallway rig made for Inception or how some scenes in Apollo 13 were shot at high altitude to simulate weightlessness. The closest sort of information to this is the lengths the production went to prevent leaks. Of course, that didn’t stop the details of the series finale being leaked before it aired.
The main draw of Game of Thrones: The Last Watch is the emotion behind it. The documentary reveals humanizing details about the unsung heroes. It also focuses a fair amount of time on the actor who played the Night King. It’s a cliché, but when you work with people for so long, they do become like family. The feeling is universal, from the stars to the extras and the people doing the scheduling.
Though I wasn’t all that interested, it’s hard to give The Last Watch too low of a score. It would be like saying the crew’s sacrifices didn’t matter. If you’re the kind of person who loves watching hours of behind the scenes footage or if you need one last bit of closure, you might enjoy this documentary. But if you’re like me, just seeing the finished product, knowing it’s the result of thousands of people’s hard work, is enough.
