That battle was a terrible representation of medieval warfare. And it was still one of the better representations of the entire show.
I don't need it to be historically accurate (if anything I'd prefer it didn't even pretend to be about 'Romans' or whatever, like GoT doesn't, since then there's an historical truth for it to (likely) miss) but the more GoT went on the more dragony, visiony, giants-y, etc. it seemed to get, and while I enjoyed it I do find it harder to engage (or perhaps rather easier to disengage, take a while to get into, etc.) with that sort of stuff.
It has a touch of the supernatural since it's based on the Icelandic sagas, but it's a fairly minor element.
The article mentions this as possibly one of the things that make a flanking attack so terrifying -- it would squish the ranks together in a way that a frontal attack didn't.