It’s a look I haven’t seen anywhere else: hyper-real, almost a cross between filming of real persons and places and a glossy CGI look. The use of slow-motion is also really cool and hard for me to figure out. The individual scenes are to varying degrees slow-motion or have a kind of low-frame-rate look, but there is always something moving in each one.
The rest of the movie has a somewhat similar glossy, comic-y look to it, but it’s extreme in this intro.
I’m surprised this look hasn’t been more imitated, as bullet time was from The Matrix.
I don’t think there’s much to explain. It’s filmed in slow motion, like you noted, with a colour palette and lighting scheme designed to resemble a comic book panel, with a wide depth of field to keep most of the elements in the same degree of focus, as comic art commonly is.
It’s what you might call a tableau, which is to say they’re staged to tell multiple parts of a story in a single image.
GL has it. Slow-mo filming plus specialized lighting plus CGI plus sheer genius in every aspect… easy enough.
It’s one of the most “watchable by itself” title sequences I know of. A close second is the one for the remake of Gone in 60 Seconds, but it’s a miniature portrait (almost literally) compared to the Sistine Chapel ceiling that is Watchmen. (Don’t miss the Batman reference!)
I agree that it’s genius. Wish Snyder could have put such genius into his other films. (Though I am rather indifferent about the film as a whole. Though that’s more a matter of the base story instead of the direction.)
There’s not more to the intro’s look, tho? No special processing involved in getting that candy-coated look?
Not really. A digital colour grade, very good lighting and staging, and some CGI tweaks such as the backgrounds, but most of it is real and in-camera. As much as I despise Zack Snyder’s films, he was coming off 300 when he made this, so was really big on carefully staged stylised effects.
Then he went onto Sucker Punch and got too self-indulgent, went way too far and has never come back.
The actual scenes play a big part, too–looking like dioramas or classical paintings (The Last Supper, for instance). It ends up looking both realistic and not-quite-real.
I seem to remember someone saying that scenes like The Right Stuff’s or Reservoir Dogs’ “guys walking towards the camera in slow motion” were filmed in high speed, and cranked down to just below normal speed to give it a hyper-real feel, and extra detail. Am I completely misremembering something? And if I’m not, is that something that’s going on here?
