While we have been burning through cast announcements for Amazon’s God of War series, I did not realize we would be getting a look at the series in action so quickly. Now, Amazon Prime Video has just released the first look at Ryan Hurst as Kratos and Callum Vinson as Atreus.
It looks…strange.
The costuming seems fine and very 1:1 to the game. Hurst is almost unrecognizable as Kratos, which was sort of a necessary development. But I’m not sure if the way this shot is rendered or lit or framed, but it does not look good. It’s like cosplay, or some sort of fan film. My first thought was that it was AI until I saw that it really was an official still.
I am not willing to dismiss this entire project on a single shot, but this needed to be a better first impression. There has been positive buzz around what has felt like a pretty pitch-perfect cast spanning both games at once, but this is just odd-looking.
There are complaints that Hurst is not exploding with enough muscle to be on point with Kratos’ size, but outside of pure bodybuilders and maybe Dave Bautista five years ago, I’m not sure how much more you can push Hurst here. This is also sort of a weird, hunched-over angle.
As for Callum Vinson, when he was cast, he seemed on point for young Atreus, though his hair looks like it’s styled like one of those sample images you see when you’re trying to tell a barber how to cut your kids’ hair.
The God of War series is a huge undertaking for Amazon, a beloved property with a fanbase that will accept nothing less than a Fallout-quality production. But I have long viewed Kratos as one of the hardest video game leads to cast and throw into live-action, and this may demonstrate, at least a little bit, how hard that’s going to be.
Again, I think it is too early to dismiss the project based on one single image that I think is hurt by the way it’s presented, not the characters themselves, and I would advise Amazon to release more, better-looking shots as soon as possible. I am half wondering if this is a pasted-together concept shot rather than something that was actually filmed on a set. It just looks weird to me.
We still do not have a release date, but the show is filming now. It will almost certainly not arrive until 2027 as a result, and hopefully, the more we see from it, the better it will look, because this does not look good.
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