Beautifully directed by Miguel Sapochnik, The Battle of the Bastards took the simple theme “war is hell” and paid homage to everything from the opening moments of Saving Private Ryan to Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, which features probably the greatest battle sequence ever filmed, a six-minute depiction of the horror and futility of combat in which the only sound comes from Tôru Takemitsu’s score. The Battle of the Bastards can’t quite match that, but there are moments, most notably the terrifying scene in which Jon is slowly crushed under the weight of dead men, his vision narrowing to pinpricks, when it comes close. Time magazine called Sapochnik’s work “among the most beautifully shot in the show’s history”, while the New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum hailed it as “an action sequence with a flexible humanity, and a thoughtfulness about war, that the larger plotlines too often lack.”
She was right that what makes The Battle of the Bastards both so terrifying and so humane is its understanding that war is chaotic, that having right on your side doesn’t always mean you will win and that even if you do struggle to victory, thousands of other human beings will have died for your cause.
The high price of war was never more obvious than in the show’s final moments, the overdue reckoning between Ramsay and his brutalised bride Sansa. Game of Thrones is often accused of being all spectacle and no subtlety but this confrontation, which both disturbed and satisfied, was a clever reminder that the most devastating moments are not always played out on the battlefield. “Your words will disappear. Your house will disappear. Your name will disappear. My memory of you will disappear,” Sansa told her blood-spattered and cowed husband, in a scene that would not have been out of place in a Jacobean tragedy.
It isn’t perfect – the arrival of the Knights of the Vale in time to save the day was too pat, although the scene, shot from above, when they circle Ramsay’s men remains eerily beautiful. Yet it has become the US’s most award-laden hour of television for a reason: it’s an ambitious, involving and dramatically satisfying hour of drama which thrusts the audience into the heart of the action and makes them, however briefly, taste the reality of war.
BBC
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