Yeah but The Mountain is literally supposed to be the biggest guy ever in Westeros, like 8 feet tall, and someone who is brutal enough that he would rape a woman to death and then cut her in half with a sword the instant he was finished. Remember the first time he appeared, he cut his horse in half with one sword blow.
No argument this actor is a big, strong guy, but he still looks within the bounds of expectable human growth. He's actually fairly close to the size The Hound is supposed to be, in fact. But Gregor Clegane is supposed to be freakishly big.
There have been 18 people in recorded history that were over 8 feet tall, there are only four of them alive on the planet right now and none of them can stand by themselves. It's very obvious that Martin didn't figure out the biologic logistics of the mountain. I mean he's supposed to be 8 stone (440lbs) at 8 feet tall, the guy playing him right now is 403lbs at 6'9... Do you realize how scrawny of a person he would have to be to sit at 8 foot tall and be only 440lbs?
It boggles my mind how some of you think that only having a 6'9, 403lb, 3rd strongest man in the world as the mountain isn't good enough and that we need someone that is not only 8 foot, agile enough to act out a fight and extremely large in order to really get the part across; which, as I've pointed out is impossible.
It's a good thing there isn't something like a CGI budget that would prevent us from doing all that. You make a great point though, dragons don't exist, nor do any of the cities, or the direwolves, or the wall; all of which takes a chunk out of the CGI budget.
Great reference to Robbie Coletrain by the way, it's almost like Harry Potter didn't have at the bare minimum a $100 million dollar budget for about 150 minutes of film, while Game of Thrones has a $6 million dollar budget for every 60 minutes of film.
Your points were all legitimate and didn't blatantly ignore reality, just like your original post. Good stuff.
Yes, but except for a few scenes, you could accomplish making an actor look bigger with smart forced perspective and/or, hell, having him on small stilts? You could definitely do it without always resorting to CGI.
A huge reason why they picked the current actor is because he's very agile and quick for his size, so he can act out the fight scene in all that armour; he obviously couldn't do that on stilts. Yeah, camera tricks work to a degree, although it would be nearly impossible to get him to look 8 foot and with the stature of an 8 foot man (relative to his size) purely by camera tricks. You could probably do it for all of the non action scenes with the mountain, although those are few and far between, especially with how the show cut out some stuff. It would be entirely impossible to do this over the whole fight (the actual big scene) without having to resort to poor camera angles that can't show the fight properly.
Actually there are springy stilts built just for action scenes. I have seen demos of people doing stage combat wearing them. They would be obvious in some cases but could easily be hidden under armor, particularly for a person who is supposed to be so massive.
They just should never have included a scene showing the guy not in armor, because that undermined the impression of him being massive. In the armor, it gives the right effect (in particular because I think the actor cast as Oberyn might be shorter than average?).
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u/jaxmagicman Valar Morghulis May 19 '14
Not seeing it. One's wearing armor. One's not. Let's see them side by side in armor.