Infinity War spoiler thread

Except that those things are very different from movie to movie. At most you can say that the directors are supposed to still have a "real world" feel for scenes which are set on earth. But even there you have the overly green scenery in The Incredible Hulk, the sepia colours and very deliberate war time adventure feel of The First Avenger and the vibrant Wakanda. Same with the score. Due to most character NOT having a leitmotiv, the musical scores have a lot of leeway. The only thing you can make out as kind of typical for the MCU is the emphasis on actual songs over the score. And even this isn't true the moment you come to the Avengers movies, which do have a very distinctive theme.

The video is critical but it is not malicious. It doesn't misrepresent any of the footage, points out areas where it looks better than normal and is factual in all the information presented. The end result is certainly subjective, but it's rather notable that the vibrant GOTG 2 preview footage shown IS dulled down in the movie itself. You can generally mix and match clips from most of the MCU movies and they have a uniform look to them, from Captain America to GOTG.

A good exercise is comparing the extremely good looking Pacific Rim to Pacific Rim: Uprising, which is more bright and "colorful" but has significantly less depth for the same reasons.

I would argue it does misrepresent by picking and choosing scenes which are not necessarily representative for the movie in question. If you want to make a point about Got G, pick a space scene. If you want to make a point of the MCU as a whole, pick a scene typical for every single movie in the MCU. And then we can talk.

The video provides its own counterexamples within the MCU, which ruins any sort of bad faith accusation you may have. The argument is not whether or not this issue exists or that some movies are better than others, but the reasons why. It is a persistent problem, and let's just say this probably contributes to why the MCU hasn't had any Oscar wins.

The MCU hasn't had any Oscar wins because

1. The Academy is biased against genre movies.

2. Marvel doesn't care for awards, so they don't do any "for your consideration" campaigns.

3. In some cases it is Disney itself which ensures that the MCU doesn't get for example the special effect award, because they put something out which beats the MCU handily (ie there was no doubt that Jungle Book would get this one).

4. While the MCU has a lot of good movies and is impressive as a collected work, it is kind of in a category of its own when it comes to movie making. There is simply no award for "outstanding world building".

It certainly has little to do with its colour grading.

Edited by Swanpride on Aug 21st 2018 at 10:33:00 AM

Not sure where you're getting that information, they do "For Your Consideration" campaigns like all other big budget, successful blockbusters. And blockbusters, comic book or otherwise, are perennial contenders for all the technical awards. It's the one place the academy doesn't have too much bias. I am certain these criticisms about things like color grading, sound design and score is what has prevented the MCU from being nominated more or winning any nominations.

Edited by KJMackley on Aug 21st 2018 at 11:02:24 AM

#0 None of them, even sort of deserve it.

this washed-out filter on everything.

I am pretty sure that the colors in multi-million dollar films are not handled by slapping on filters. I remember an annoyed tweet from Larry Fong (Bv S cinematographer)where he was like "Guys, creating the look of these movies is a lot more complicated that selecting some type of "washed out" setting on Instagram."

Well, I remember that Disney offered to run a for you consideration campaign for The Winter Soldier, and Marvel declined. I don't think that they care about awards at all, they care about box office numbers. Which, btw, also happens to be Disney's philosophy, if they get an award it is a bonus, it is not the big goal.

Edited by Swanpride on Aug 21st 2018 at 11:26:16 AM

Yeah, that's the joke. They go through colour correction on each of these movies, and I'm sure, or at least I hope that, it's not as simple as applying the same settings to every scene in frame, but it's all this work being done with the end result looking like they just turned the contrast down. Colour grading can enhance a shot, and there's some great camerawork in the films, and you could see the eye for color the directors certainly had in Black Panther or Ragnarok. But it just seems toned down throughout the movie, and there doesn't seem to be much reason for it or thought behind it — it just is.

This was never my complaint about BVS — in terms of how he puts a shot together, Zack Snyder can compose a scene in a very painterly way which actually highlights what I'm talking about. He's always had a great sense of (very, very slow) movement and colour theory (editing, characterization, let's not get into that). BVS is visually dark, but the light and colour stand out in each shot. It's meticulously done. And the MCU can have those moments, too (I'm thinking of Valkyrie's flashback in Ragnarok). It's just odd that they opt for that faded look so much of the time.

Marvel has had a few nods for visual effects, haven't they? Nominations, no wins. I feel like that's fair.

Edited by Unsung on Aug 21st 2018 at 1:27:23 PM

And that is where you lose me completely. The colour palette of Bv S is terrible. It's muddy, and it often makes it difficult to see what is even happening in the night scenes. I NEVER had that problem with any of the MCU movies.

The only thing I give to Bv S is that the look is kind of distinctive, but distinctive isn't always also good. In the case of Bv S it only works in the "stand still" scenes, but as soon as there is fast movement, it looks like someone just mushed the colour together.

Yeah, BVS is pretty awful in terms of color. There are MCU movies that go for more downplayed color palates, but both Guardians and Ragnarok are super colorful and bright.

I really don't get the "everything looks brown" criticism because it mostly only applies to fight scenes where a bunch of dust has been kicked up and you'd expect the air to look brown. That's just realistic.

Edited by PushoverMediaCritic on Aug 21st 2018 at 12:14:09 PM

Is dust and realism really what you want to argue in favour of? Really? There isn't dust in every shot, but that faded quality is there throughout. Everything doesn't just look brown or grey, but washed out, muddy, less distinct.

It's not that they look brown as much as brown-ish, browner than they actually are.

I agree that BVS doesn't look good at high speeds, in action scenes where they don't ratchet up the slow-mo. It's jarring and jittery, often because of the same sharpness that works for it in still shots. But that's it's own issue. The MCU's colour grading problem is actually a lot easier to fix, in part because it only seems to be an issue with colour grading — the colours and camerawork are, as I've been saying, already there.

You don't seem to be following — this isn't about colour palettes. The colour palettes are almost always passable and even quite good at times. It's about contrast and saturation — how bright the colours are, and how dark the shadows are, in relation to each other.

Edited by Unsung on Aug 21st 2018 at 1:37:56 PM

But the colour grading is fine. They go for a realistic vibe, which I quite like. I wouldn't want it to look like, ie, the Spiderman trilogy or even The Dark Knight. The whole point of the MCU is after all that it is our world with a little bit extra.

“Realism” as a justification is very subjective because tons of opposing cinematographic styles can be justified as “realistic”.

”Realism, as usual, is simply a fig leaf for doing what you want. Virtually any technique can be justified as realistic according to some conception of what's important in the scene. If you shoot the action cogently, with all the moves evident, that's realistic because it shows you what's 'really' happening. If you shoot it awkwardly, that presentation is 'realistically' reflecting what a participant perceives or feels. If you shoot it as 'chaos'... — well, action feels chaotic when you're in it, right? Forget the realist alibi. What do you want your sequence to do to the viewer?” David Bordwell

Given as the MCU is a setting that revels in its heightened elements of “cyborg billionaire vs. unfrozen 90-year-old Frisbee Man vs robot butler turned superghost vs goth witch made from space rock vs His Majesty King Furry”, etc, it is not a setting that begs to look “realistically gray”.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Aug 21st 2018 at 2:08:36 AM

Realism is all well and good, but they could go a little less subdued, IMO. I mean, I live in reality, it doesn't look quite like that. But that's fine, that's your call to make. Just as long as we're on the same page about what the issue is. I wouldn't want them to go full four-colour Raimi Spider-Man like they are in the test videos, either, but they could turn it up a little.

There is certainly that. But people can and do like the idea of realistic superheroes, which is how we got the X-Men movie and the Ultimates. I'm not prepared to argue with them on that — people like what they like, it's a balancing act, and they could go too far in the opposite direction — hyper-stylized like in the Snyder movies, just for the obvious example.

Edited by Unsung on Aug 22nd 2018 at 1:15:45 PM

Wait, what?

Vision, Scarlet Witch, and Black Panther.

Oh.

There's a difference between brown and grey "realism" and "realism is actually brown and grey". The MCU movies go with the latter. I dunno, maybe it's because I live in Arizona, where dust is everywhere and everything is sun-bleached, but the MCU movies look completely realistic to me.

Color correction is different from the imagery itself. The GOTG films have some of the best cinematography, imagery and variety of colors in the MCU, but the color correction flattens everything. In principle it should enhance the atmosphere of a scene and location. Sometimes it's taken to the point of a cliche Color Wash by genre, off-reality genres have a green tone like The Matrix, war films have a dusty brown like Saving Private Ryan, sun-baked locations are a yellow/orange like O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Good color correction modifies everything scene by scene, environment by environment instead of a blanket filter across the board.

Color correction impacts the general lighting of a scene, how dark the shadows are, how the character is shaped by the light source and how blown out the highlights are. With the MCU they take their duller color correction to apply to just about everything, both outdoor sun-baked locations and indoor florescent scenes seem to be lit the same and keep the exact same color value (ie Iron Man maroon-ish red), even though different lighting should change color value. In terms of how the characters are lit, Titan looks identical to New York and the Sanctum looks identical to the Q ship. Genuine Film Noir scenes are generally absent because everything is so evenly lit. The Netflix shows do better at this than the movies.

It was actually rather fascinating to listen to Wally Pfister talk about shooting Moneyball because baseball stadiums are designed to be evenly lit from all angles and that's how all baseball movies film baseball games. So he ended up playing with the stadium lights themselves to make the image look darker and more dynamic without sacrificing the baseball look.

There was an interview that the writers of the movie did with Collider recently in which they reveal some facts about the Thor vs Thanos scene at the end of the movie:

-Stormbreaker was able to cleave through the Infinity Gauntlet's beam because Eitri built a weakness into it and made both weapons. A comparison to the Death Star is made with Rogue One.

-Stormbreaker is not particularly more powerful than Mjolnir, and is made of the same material (uru), but it had a blade so it could be used for more than just smashing.

-Thor's very durable and his skin is hard to break (yet we've seen Kurse do it by throwing a rock, so not impossible), but it's easier to knock him out and hurt him than it is to break his flesh. They didn't say why though. Maybe because his internals aren't particularly super-durable? That would explain why Odin was able to casually demote him to human-level just by taking away his magic, without altering the composition of his body.

Edited by Kamiccolo on Aug 29th 2018 at 8:41:28 AM

First point is very interesting

Ah, so the ol' Luke Cage principle.

Wait what principle?

Thicc skin, soft insides.