I watched the movie Arrival a couple of days ago, while I thought it was pretty good it was so dark I had trouble telling what was happening, in fact I had to wait until it was night and watch it in a pitch-black room to be able to enjoy it. I notice from a couple of comments in the recent thread on the movie that other people felt the same thing.
This seems to be a recent trend and its almost as bad as shaky-cam, I found the recent movie on Lincoln in particular to be particularly bad in this respect, even the scenes apparently set outside in broad daylight were dark and gloomy.
Please Mr and Mrs Movie Maker, stop it.
Have other people noticed the same thing, and why has it caught on if so?
I haven’t noticed “dark” as a trend recently, but I am well familiar with fads in film production. When I was a kid, it was the era of post WW2 self-congratulation, and almost every film was about patting America on the back for being so inherently brilliant all the time. That sidled into a fad about how crazy nuclear war would be, and how only space aliens or ancient earth primordial monsters could prevent it, or could give us a reason not to kill each other.
Then in the seventies, came a fad of depression. Almost every film that came out from 1968 until Star Wars (1977) was about how the bad guys either always win, or how the good guys are actually every bit is disturbingly scummy as the bad guys are.
There have been all sorts of style fads in films too. Every time someone came up with a film technique or technology and made a very successful (i.e. profitable) film with it, a bunch of wannabees would make a slew of garbage films using the same thing, until all the more idiotic producers realized that it wasn’t the “trick” that made the movie successful after all.
TV shows are really dark now, too. I call out Hawaii 50 for this in particular. Considering they shoot in Hawaii, couldn’t they give us more sunshine and less unlit rooms?
Another consideration is that previous dark movies have done very well, so they are making more dark movies in the hope that that’s what the viewing public wants to see. This would also explain the tendency to make sequels and reboots, rather than entirely original movies.
I think part of it is the “aspect ratio” battle all over again. Movies have to compete with TV, and now, home theaters. So they try and do things you can only show in a movie theater, and which will be unsatisfying at home. Like widescreen formatting. Or surround sound. Or really dark scenes.
It’s also probably just a fad, too. Because I’ve seen it done on TV, and poorly. But I also think it can be done well. For example, lighting can take me right out of a scene. When the characters are in a dark bedroom, woken up at 3am, but it looks like there’s a spotlight right outside their window (because there is)? Terrible. Or scenes set indoors during the middle ages where everything is lit up like 21st Century Las Vegas. But I would also like to see the characters’ faces. So there’s some balancing to be done there.
This is true. It’s called ‘Show Business’, after all. Why be original, when you can copy a known quantity?
Another technique that IMO has been overused is the narrow shutter angle, perhaps best depicted in the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan. Motion picture cameras operate at 24 frames per second (25 in Europe). With a regular 180º shutter, you have an exposure of 1/48 second. With a 45º shutter, your exposure is 1/192 second. Think about this in terms of still photography. If your shutter speed is lower than 1/60 second, you may want to consider a tripod or else you may get motion blur from subtle hand movements. A long exposure is a good way to show speed and motion. With a short exposure, you lose the motion blue. In a motion picture, the less-blurred images give, in my mind, a sense of ‘hyper-reality’; like when you’re in a stressful/dangerous situation and everything appears to be in sharp focus. It worked well in Saving Private Ryan and Three Kings, but suddenly everyone wanted to copy the successful effect – to the point where it became annoying. (And I’ve already posted elsewhere about my disdain for ‘shaky cam’.)
Gaaaaaah, it drives me crazy! I regularly yell, “I can’t see what’s happening!!” at the tv. No, they can’t hear me (probably), but it makes me feel better.
Roger Ebert and others complained for years that most theater owners deliberately dimmed down the bulb in the projectors to increase their lifespan. This of course makes the movie much dimmer.
Perhaps these dimmer movies became what is expected by movie goers and with digital projection they are emulating it.
It’s almost as bad as (and possibly corollary to) the decade-long trend of having every other movie be predominately blue/orange complementary palette. I enjoyed it at first, because limited palettes are a nice artistic flair, but now…damn. I’m ready for some Technicolor. That’s one reason I enjoyed Breaking Bad so much (though it isn’t a single film). Their judicious use of color conveys so much to mood and setting, both in repetition and via contrast to palettes in previous scenes. They didn’t simply post-process the whole shebang with a particular filter to give it unity.
Anyway, if you want to skim the article I linked to (or not), it’s mentioned that the orange/blue palette comes from punching up skin tones and hair (which are generally in the orange part of the spectrum) and blueish hues will then have the most contrast (visual punch) for backgrounds. But that actually leads to less contrast within those backgrounds, making everything harder to discern…and feeling dark and dreary.
In contrast (ha!) think of old Kodachrome photos from the 50s-70s in which the reds (and to some degree, greens) were often oversaturated to the point of losing detail in those parts of the spectrum. They didn’t necessarily seem dark, however, given how we process reds in our brains. But without proper care, those reds were flat as hellcompared to the rest of the picture.
If they want to avoid that dreariness in post, a better solution might be to up the saturation in a split complementary way. So along with boosting the orange side for people, boost the neutrals more toward a more greenish-blue AND red-violet. I’m guessing this might be more complicated digitally; I’m well out of that loop these days. But that should give you a more vibrant film that still has a lot of impact, while being easier on the eye as far as detail.
EDIT: I just checked out stills of the film *Arrival *(haven’t seen it). Yup, it’s blue and orange.
When something is filmed digitally, it comes into your computer in RAW format, with HDR. That is, a default flat colour grade that is very pale and washed out, with a lot of scope for almost infinite adjustments. It takes a lot of skill to manage that amount of possibility, and we’re still in the early stages of experimentation amongst the artists and technicians in the grading and editing departments. On their expensive equipment, they may be seeing a better quality final image than we get to see on our home theatres, or even in the cinemas, and their subtle tweaks are probably lost to our sunlit rooms and poorly set up TVs.
Having said that, Arrival was set in a damp grey location, so there were deliberate choices made to maintain that gloomy atmosphere.
Especially in The Man Who Knew Infinity, which I could see pretty well on the big screen, but which I thought even at the time would look quite obscured and gloomy in a smaller format.
That’s one reason I enjoyed Breaking Bad so much (though it isn’t a single film). Their judicious use of color conveys so much to mood and setting, both in repetition and via contrast to palettes in previous scenes. They didn’t simply post-process the whole shebang with a particular filter to give it unity.