Amazon proudly debuted its first official image from its upcoming live-action God of War show, and the internet promptly tore it to shreds. It showed actor Ryan Hurst as Kratos and Atreus actor Callum Vinson in costume for the first time, hunting in the woods, and it just looked…weird. I’m not sure I saw a single positive reaction to it from social media to articles to YouTube. I certainly didn’t have anything nice to say.
Ryan Hurst chimed in not to defend the image, per se, but to caution people against judging the series based on it. “Don’t believe everything you see on the internet, kids,” he said in a social media post on Saturday.
If I didn’t know any better, I would think that he was saying it was a fake or AI image, which is what some people accused it of being, but it was very much something that Amazon official shared.
Rather, I think the idea here is that this is probably not an actual still from the filming of the show (though the show is filming now), but a test shot of the two in-costume, similar to how we just saw a picture of Sophie Turner as Lara Croft (also filming her upcoming live-action video game adaptation show, currently). So, it may look off based on it being that kind of posed shot. It could even be some sort of composite, which is why it all looks so strange.
I saw a lot of fans taking to Photoshop or AI themselves to “fix” the image, thickening Kratos’ beard of making his face darker around the eyes. There are also complaints that Ryan Hurst (at 6’6) just isn’t jacked enough to be game Kratos, who is positively exploding with muscle. I think A) that hunched-over pose wasn’t doing him any favors and B) I don’t think it’s mandatory to inject the poor guy with enough steroids to kill a bull to try and replicate a hardcore bodybuilder physique, but it is a common complaint.
Before this, God of War had been praised pretty consistently for its casting of various roles from both the first and second games, which appear to be getting combined in part for season 1. Every part seemed spot-on. But this cooled off the vibes a little bit. I do agree, however, that we should not judge the entire show based on one bad shot. It does make me wonder why anyone at Amazon greenlit that in the first place, if even the star actor is confirming that it’s bad, but hopefully that does not happen twice.
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