Infinity War spoiler thread

I feel like touching on the Snap a bit. Okay, I know it's already been meme'd and spoiled like crazy and is gonna be undone in A4 somehow (some hero getting the Gauntlet and doing a countersnap, maybe?), but I can't really blame IW itself for it being undercut. I still think that in and of itself it was very, very effectively chilling, suspenseful and heartbreaking. Like, "oh god, who's gonna perish next???" "Holy shit they killed Spider-Man/Star-Lord/Black Panther/Doctor Strange!" "THANOS WON!" "THE GUARDIANS ARE DEAD T_T" and so forth.

Here's something I came up with: watching the whole mass disintegration sequence but with the shoegaze-y second half or so of Come Back by Deafheaven (skip to 5:16 or so) playing as background music, with movie audio and song audio adjusted to accomodate both. There's a lot of songs you could do this with but this is the first that jumped to mind and it stuck out to me with how effective it is in making the scene all the more gutting.

Time for all good little Hulks to go to bed.

Goodnight moon.
Goodnight Sakaar.
Goodnight dead people left from Asgard.
Goodnight giant dog.
Goodnight puny god.
Goodnight spiky lady and goodnight Ragnarok.
Goodnight Cosmic Cube.
Goodnight Infinity Mitten.
Goodnight Eyepatch Thor
And goodnight stupid Avengers, sun getting real low.

...So did all this and the third act of Ragnarok happen in the same, like, 72-hour period? That would be kind of great.

I assume it's Time-Travel shenanigans that undoes the snap. Weren't there set pics of characters in their Avengers 1 costumes alongside newer characters? That seems like they'll be traveling to the past at some point.

Pretty much, yeah.

Thor had one absurdly shitty week.

That happened to me too when I saw the movie. I actually started whispering a bunch of Little Nos when Spider-Man was about to disappear. :'(

I remember there were a couple "Not Groot/Spider-Mans" at my theater.

I'm also going to have to find a way to either get the money for a private showing or else wait for a weekday matinee for A4. My theater was one of the ones where people thought they were supposed to laugh as loud and long as possible anytime something even remotely humerous happened. Fortunately they wisened up somewhere between Knowhere and Vormire, but I still had to watch it again later on just to catch a lot of the Thor/Guardians dialogue.

Both of my cinema viewings were pretty loud but fortunately not so much as to cover up dialogue.

Also, finally watched Ant-Man and The Wasp (curse you, month UK delay!), which thread should I use to discuss how that ending might relate to A4?

I can't lavish enough praise on the movie and actors for making Spider-Man's death actually affect me. It's a movie and I 300% know it won't stick and it still was insanely heartbreaking.

That is damn impressive.

Yeah, I didnt really care about that because it feel waaaaaay to dramatic like a soap opera.

But loki dying? now THAT was awfull and pretty fucking brutal, seeing the final moment in how he and thor are near before the whole thing blow up.....

Prop to russo brother to ACTUALLY giving thor a serious moment, I was annoying in him being the comic relief of the avenger.

Watching this again and I'm starting to remember how effective the score gets. The entries of Steve Rogers in Scotland and Thor, Rocket and Groot in Wakanda are obviously enhanced by the Avengers theme (s) but I also wanna mention the scene where Thanos is neutralizing the first few people getting in his way when he's coming for Vision. It's kind of horrifying. Like, this fucking hulking creature is effortlessly striding along on his merry way to kill half of the universe and this last ditch effort from everyone putting everything they have into stopping him isn't doing jack shit. Then it turns to tragic as the same music from when Thanos sacrificed Gamora kicks back in. Then it all goes away when everyone disintegrates. Pretty heavy shit.

Yeah, my favourite score in the MCU so far is actually the lack of a score. Having the end in total silence is so much more impactful than swelling music.

Someone changed the saturation of a snippet of the New York fight scene to make it look more like a comic book.

Is there a case study that said non-comics fans' eyes just get tired when they increase the saturation? Do they think "brown is realistic" is what helped get them their huge market share? I really want to know.

@Pushover Media Critic ...What?

Edited by Unsung on Aug 20th 2018 at 7:31:33 AM

Dust in comics billows in clear and bubbly clouds. Dust in real life just makes the air brown. The only time dust in real life forms bubbly clouds is when there's a giant dust storm headed your way.

Honestly, it just reminds me why I'm ambivalent about the cinematography in the MCU in general. The overall colorscape is too uniform, even brightening the colors just reinforces how much the characters blend into the background rather than stand out. A video posted a long time ago talked about the general lack of true blacks in the shadows, instead being a dark grey, and that makes the characters look very flat against the background. The use of things like smoke, dust and debris helps separate the characters from the background, giving the image a sense of depth. Given that 95% of that sequence is CG anyway, the added saturation just makes it look like a video game cutscene.

^^ To be honest, I think there is studies done by studios on the most pleasing color palette, hence the dominance of Orange/Blue Contrast. Whenever you do focus groups on these things you tend to get the most inoffensive and bland results. Really striking imagery isn't always the easiest to watch because it demands you pay attention.

Here's the video.

The washed out color grading is a real problem. Doctor Strange was the film I had the most problem with for most of the scenes being an unappealing brown, and even the scenes that should be colorful being too dark and uniform in tone.

I don't know. These things pop but something about the bright colors makes it look too fake to me.

I don't think just boosting the saturation will help any pallet issues.

... I also have no issues with the films when I'm actually watching them? I never stop and think "oh the colors seem flat and dull".

Well in that video they were modifying an image already color corrected, so the added saturation was going to look more fake. But the point was made how the image was more dynamic with actual black tones.

When that "What if Man of Steel was in color?" video came out I was actively annoyed by how it treated color grading in film, and a little bit on how everyone believed in what was said and that the changes improved the look of the movie. Certainly the movie was dark and had some muted colors, but in HDR the colors are more vibrant and most importantly it didn't sabotage the cinematography like the MCU movies and Justice League, which had some of the most atrocious looking color correction in any comic book movie. I guess at least the MCU color correction hides the imperfections in the costumes and fx.

Universally upping the saturation isn't the answer, but darker blacks and more vibrant brights... They're in there. I was sort of joking before, but I am curious if there's a reason Marvel opts for this washed-out filter on everything. It does create a uniformity among MCU movies, I suppose. But is that the only reason? It doesn't seem fair to the cinematography of movies like Black Panther or Ragnarok. I remember comparing the first trailer for Black Panther with the one that came out just a month later, and I just can't see the latter as an improvement.

Man of Steel was definitely grey, but they were sharp greys. There was a method to it. I don't like it, but it fit the tone they were going for. I can respect that. But the same desaturated filter ruthlessly applied to every movie in post? There has to be a thought process for that.

I hate this video...for one, it takes the scene on Xandar and acts as if it represents the whole of Got G, and the movie is, well, purple. It isn't desaturated at all.

I also don't think that the redone scene looks in any way good. It looks fake.

And, btw, Doctor Strange isn't desaturated either. The movie just goes for a brown and gold colour palette for the real world, so that that scenes between the realms pop more.

And that is not saying that I feel that the Cinematography in the MCU is the greatest thing ever. But the "bad colour" complain falls to me in the same category as the "bad score" and the "bad villain" category. It is not something you have to discuss for the MCU as a whole, but something which might be worth mentioning regarding separate movies. And which needs to be seen in context. Ie the Winter Soldier has a very muted colour palette, but that is the point, not only does it captured the mood of the typical political thriller, it also contrasts great to the often sepia coloured The First Avenger. That one used colour to create a feeling of nostalgia, this one goes for a lot of grey so that the world in which Steve Roger fell seems cold and uninviting.

Yeah, and there’s just two of them. The real world shouldn’t look boring and muddy when it’s at a wizard temple.

A thing can be purple and still be desaturated. It has more to do with appearing faded than being specifically grey or brown. Colours are more neutral with regard to one another. When people talk about whether or not colours "pop" or are vibrant, this is generally what they're talking about.

The touched-up scenes aren't perfect by themselves, but they just highlight just how much this affects these movies. And you totally can talk about Marvel's desaturated palette, generally bland scores, and many forgettable villains. But people aren't saying that they're bad, exactly. They're just kind of there, a lot of the time. Of course there are times when they can all shine, but the exceptions aren't really the point, because they have the kind of juggernaut budget and talent base that it's just kind of odd that they seemingly choose to go for the generic in these areas.

You can talk about them if you examine a singular movie. You maybe can point out a trend you see. You can't act as if you see about one movie is true for all movies in the MCU.

And if this video wanted to make a point about desaturation by using Got G as example, it would have been honest to pick a scene in space, where the majority of the movie is set, instead of a scene at Xandar, which only turns up at the beginning and the very end.

You can with the MCU, though, because they work from a definite template — there's got to be a production design handbook out there somewhere. And this isn't a subjective, sweeping judgment on the quality of the films or anything. It's just about certain choices being made in terms of musical composition, writing, and color correction. You can argue about whether or not what these things are working, and that's fine — I wouldn't say it ruins the movies or anything — but not that it isn't there.