2021-03-24, 01:26 PM
(This post was last modified: 2021-03-24, 01:40 PM by pipefan413.)
(2021-03-24, 11:56 AM)Franky Wrote: I'm not a fan either actuallyI just find this general trend toward less color and contrast in movies nowadays very annoying personally. And it's absolutely not just a Snyder or DC thing exclusively.
Ha!
Yeah, it's not just him.
The "black and white version" thing is also a kind of funny trend that's happened with a few films lately that I know of, all of which I feel are more justified in that level of pretentiousness than this is. MAD MAX: FURY ROAD? Sure, it's a high contrast visual spectacle, so that works (it doesn't work universally for every shot but most of the film looks good). LOGAN? Sure, why not, it's emulating old grim Westerns, so that makes sense. PARASITE? Film festival darling, totally unsurprising (I actually saw it in B&W at its UK premiere in Glasgow). But... this? I dunno, man.
This whole grimdark superhero thing that seems to have more or less started with Nolan and been continued by Snyder with Watchmen onwards really grates on me. I love the Nolan trilogy for the most part, even though it's trying so hard to be "gritty" that it becomes comical at times, but this can't be DC's entire brand for the foreseeable future just because it worked once or twice (though Marvel seems to be evidencing the "if it ain't broke" thing by making more or less the same film over and over again with minor tweaks to the established formula on occasion). I loathed MAN OF STEEL so much because of the comically exaggerated CGI destruction and - in my opinion - fundamental misrepresentation of the Superman character that I apologised to the person I took to see it with me. Snyder got it right the first time: if you want to explore the grim reality of what it might be like if a superhero really existed in the world, you make a WATCHMEN or THE BOYS type thing, as he did to start with. But you don't mess with Superman, god dammit. Let him go and remake SPAWN or something, at least that was always going for that sorta tone in the first place; that stuff was already starting to feel dated when it was still new in the 90s...
To be fair to Snyder/Nolan though, it's much the same in DC's actual comics as well, so this just seems to be DC's entire strategy across the board. I used to work in comic shops and it was always kind of heartbreaking when you'd get parents/grandparents trying to buy stuff for their kids and saying "his favourite is Batman" or whatever and I have almost nothing to suggest because DC just stopped even trying to cater to a young audience in their comics apart from a couple of specific fringe cases. The medium is dying and it isn't going to get any kind of serious revival if they don't try to draw in new readers... but they seem not to want to cater to a younger audience for fear of alienating the neckbeard audience. You can do both, y'know? It doesn't have to be one or t'other. But I digress... what was that I said about keeping my mouth shut, again?
The problem with all these black and white versions, incidentally, is that there is a difference between lighting for colour photography and lighting for black and white photography (unless you're Jack Asher and intentionally light everything as if it's being shot in B&W) and you can't always make up for the difference in a digital regrade. It's definitely apparent in PARASITE and on occasion in MAD MAX: FURY ROAD as well. I haven't seen "LOGAN: NOIR" as I believe it's called, so I can't comment on that one.
