Highlights

  • God of War's no-cut camera technique has become a defining trait of the IP and is expected to be maintained in future related projects.
  • Amazon's live-action adaptation of God of War could challenge itself by adopting the no-cut camera approach, similar to the games.
  • While a no-cut approach would be impressive, it's not a deal-breaker for the adaptation, and Amazon should prioritize narrative retelling over choreography.

God of War would have sufficed in its overhauled reimagining with a Norse landscape and an over-the-shoulder perspective alone. Rather, Santa Monica went the extra mile and decided its storytelling would be bolstered tenfold if it managed to have no obvious camera cuts.

It’s unlikely that God of War and God of War Ragnarok would’ve suffered greatly had they not maintained this stylistic choice. Still, it’s now become a defining trait of the IP that is expected to play a role in anything else God of War-related in the foreseeable future. That includes whatever new adventure Kratos or Atreus go on, and yet it will be interesting to see if Amazon’s live-action adaptation of God of War adopts that challenge for itself on a completely separate medium.

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Amazon’s God of War Having No Cuts Would Be a Marvelous Challenge

God of War’s No-Cut Camera is a Herculean Feat

Amazon could mirror Santa Monica’s rigid storytelling technique and try to have the entire show captured in a series of no-cut shots. An impossible task on paper, God of War is at least able to hand control over to players for periods of time, but while there’s always an over-the-shoulder perspective in moment-to-moment gameplay it never breaks away from the one-shot direction.

Gameplay seamlessly transitions in and out to cutscenes and cinematics, where the camera is free to revolve around Kratos and pan to whomever else before it returns to that fixed position behind the playable protagonist and control is handed to the player again.

God of War’s Adaptation Having Camera Cuts Shouldn’t Be a Deal-Breaker

No live-action adaptation of a game has ever been fully and perfectly faithful to its source material—not even HBO’s The Last of Us, which was remarkably faithful in its pilot before making wildly distinct choices in every episode thereafter. It’s unlikely that God of War will be adapted perfectly, either, especially with how much more effects and CGI it would require to create stunning Norse vistas and Jormungandr dwelling peacefully on Migard, let alone an entire Greek pantheon with colossal gods.

However, this one-shot approach might be doable if handled as tactfully as it is in the games, hiding cuts wherever necessary or advantageous. This wouldn’t be a make-or-break scenario for the Amazon show, though, and it would probably be best if Amazon prioritizes how its God of War story will be retold narratively rather than choreographically.

God of War’s Amazon Show Can Afford to Ditch a Lot of Combat

Likewise, the advantage Amazon’s God of War will have over Santa Monica’s is that it will undoubtedly feature fewer sequences with actual combat or spectacle. HBO’s The Last of Us reduced its fight scenes to a bare minimum for pivotal beats, which made sense considering the characters would constantly find themselves in combat otherwise and that wouldn’t necessarily translate well to TV where less time is spent with characters and world-building in the same way.

Similarly, Amazon’s God of War can be expected to feature far fewer draugr, trolls, or dragons, if any at all. Amazon could center its tale solely on Baldur’s arrival at Kratos and Atreus’ home, inciting conflict with Norse gods and forcing Kratos to recount and reconcile with his past. Either way, less combat could make for a simpler time of filming scenes without cuts, though no-cut fight sequences would also be incredibly impressive if choreographed well.

In fact, the show itself could have traditional scenes and cuts, but if a fight scene or two had long, uninterrupted tracking shots a la Netflix’s Daredevil that could be a lovely nod to the games themselves. The way the Norse saga entries for God of War are structured accommodates their no-cut techniques because Kratos and Atreus are wholly engrossed, and whoever is cast in Amazon’s adaptation will have a lot of work cut out for them if the show decides to follow the games wholeheartedly.