Supermallet

Looks like cinema to me.

Tom Creo

"I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round....."

RichC2

To each their own

I don't know, what can we agree on, on yeah Gravity. That was a nicely shot rendered movie.

Supermallet

Yes, Gravity was purty, but I'd watch The Avengers over it any day.

RichC2

I wish like hell I enjoyed The Avengers.

Draven

Agreed. And I thought Serenity looked great. The shot of the armada breaking out of the clouds is one of the few times I've said "whoa" out loud while watching a movie. It's so freaking epic.

PhantomStranger

I enjoyed it but The Avengers has become massively overrated. The standards by which these mega-blockbusters get judged these days have fallen quite far.

taffer

No. The Avengers is the best comic book movie since X-Men 2.

Nolan's Batman makes good movies, but they are bad comic book movies if that makes any sense. The Avengers is like an actual comic book taken out of the drawn page and put up on the big screen. It deserves the praise.

And this is going from a massive DC fanboy. I much prefer DC overall, but I will admit that Marvel completely destroys DC in the movie department.

RocShemp

That awesome moment notwithstanding, the bulk of the movie looks like you're simply watching an episode of the show. Heck, during the Reavers versus Alliance sequence, all the shots within the Operative's main ship look like something out of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

I love Serenity but it has always looked like an extended episode of Firefly that just happened to be presented in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio.

Solid Snake

Exactly. I love Serenity but visually speaking it ain't all that complex in composition of framing or movement. Personally though I've some issue with the action, just not really powerful at times.

Disregarding Dragon Tattoo's bitching about the DP, who is actually a damn good guy at his job, at the end it has to fall on Whedon. He makes the final decision in that moment. I'm saying all this but as well I can't imagine it working without him. He is a fan, he knows the comics, and his work gushes that. I just wish he'd be more complex in his direction of the visual.

Ehhhhhh. I'd argue that the Nolan films are good comic book films as well. Either way I just fucking want a good movie at the end of it.

And if you're talking about the visual of the comic and the film, for the Avengers. If argue that the comic is much more cinematic as well.

Jay G.

I'd argue that's because the show Firefly looked cinematic, not because Serenity looked like a TV show. There were a lot of interesting camera and lighting decisions on Firefly that separated it from how TV shows are normally shot.

I mean, The X-Files movie didn't look that much different from an episode of the TV show, but that's because the TV show was so well shot.

SteelWill

And didn't Firefly pioneer the more realistic shaky cam shots of CGI spacecraft that's become the standard across TV and movies?

Jay G.

I think so. Zoic Studio's, which worked on Firefly, went on to employ many of those same techniques to the CGI in the Battlestar Galactica reboot. Wikipedia calls it Zoic's "visual trademark":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoic_Studios

Here's an article about the physical and CGI photography on Firefly, and how it's influenced films since:
http://www.vulture.com/2013/06/how-j...-of-steel.html

Get Smart employed Zoic for the shaky-cam CGI:
http://www.awn.com/articles/producti...ng-it/page/2,1

Supermallet

Complexity does not equal quality. You know what The Avengers looks like? A comic book. And that's a good thing. It's a comic book movie in every sense of the word.

Supermallet

And before everyone jumps on me, of course comic books can be complex and/or have complex visuals. But the type of superhero comics that The Avengers pulls from has clear, clean, relatively simple imagery.

The Valeyard

For me, The Avengers didn't hold up to a second viewing. The first hour is loooong and I started getting bored while watching. It does settles into a nice pace before the Battle of New York. I'd rather watch Captain America or The Incredible Hulk again before the Avengers. I found those much more entertaining.

Is it the best comic book movie? No. Not for me.

Draven

I saw it four times in the theater (never watched a movie more than twice in the theater before) and have watched it at least 5-6 times at home. I don't mind the "assembling the team" stuff because it's all entertaining. By comparison, I was bored more than once during The Dark Knight Rises because that movie is the definition of SLOOOOOOW to me.

nando820

I think people are confusing cinematic with brightness. Yeah most films tend to have a darker hue but the original Spider Man trilogy was quite colorful too and it didn't feel like a TV production

RocShemp

Lighting isn't the only problem. The shot compositions are also problematic.

Supermallet

Considering how many films are devoid of broad color palettes, that seems like an odd thing to confuse.

taffer

That's funny because I thought Captain America had a significantly slower start than The Avengers did.

Draven

I never thought that at all. I guess I need to see stills where the shots are "problematic" because I just don't get it. I watch a ton of movies in a given year and it simply looks like a movie to me .

Supermallet

There's nothing problematic about the shot compositions.

RichC2

Nope not at all, and good point, Spider-man was also quite colorful and it didn't feel like a TV production. There are other factors.

hanshotfirst1138

There's a local cinema near me which shows episodes of Thomas the Tank Engine, that does not cinema make it .

Agents of SHIELD is a TV show though.

So did Steven Spielberg. To be fair, I don't of that many "aeuters," as it were, most tend to wind up as journeymen.

Whom?

TV is being filmed in widescreen and production values are going up, but I don't know if it's looking more and more like film. Television direction still have to do what they do more in the service of the story of the overall season and the world of the show and have to work a lot more quickly and differently than film directors do. I remember really being knocked out by the pilot of The Walking Dead because it was directed by a film director rather than a TV director and looked more like a feature film than a television episode, but that's more the exception than the rule. Admittedly, I've been in and out of the TV loop, and don't watch a huge amount, but while it's taken leaps and bounds, I just don't think that directors like Hitchcock or Kubrick could ever come to a television project, even with today's technology. I actually looked up a few CSI episodes directed by some fairly heavyweight directors (Rob Zombie, Joe Dante), and with the exception of a distinctive bit or two, they mostly had to be subservient to the show's formula. Then again, Bergman did some TV work, so what do I know?

Blockbuster movies do tend to get a much less harsh judgement because they're "just supposed to be fun" and can be "good enough," which is a damn shame.

Should a comic book movie necessarily look like a comic book though? Shouldn't there be some change between the two mediums? I mean, Sin City was fun, but I don't know if I'd want every comic book movie to be a literal translation.

Well, TV shows also have to tend to be confined to the same set, whereas movies are able to open things out a lot more. As such, a lot of the show's sets probably were reused to save money and the movie was notoriously low-budget.

I don't know if I entirely agree with this. While I think that Whedon, like Abrams, tends to rely much more upon the rhythm of scripts and his movies are much more word-oriented than they are visually minded, I do think he did at least try to give Serenity a more cinematic feeling. He doesn't exactly just point and shoot, there is some attempt at using the camera in some interesting way, and it does try to play to a broader scope. Though as Whedon himself freely admits on the DVD commentary, having a top-notch ASC DP on board didn't exactly hurt either.

I think Whedon does try to move the camera more and give his action sequences a bit more scale, plus shooting in the scope aspect ratio did help.

Seamus McGarvey is a great DP and has the credentials to prove it. I can't help but be inclined to think that Whedon is a guy who thinks first in terms of words though, is a writer before he's a director. He likes canned drama and dialogue sequences, irreverence, and wit. He usually doesn't have a choice, most Whedon projects have miniscule budget and that's what he has to try to use to excite his audiences.

Actually, while Nolan doesn't come out of TV, I'm inclined to think of him more as a writer too. He's a talented director, but I think the real pleasures of his movies come out of the twists and turns in the plot and the quotable dialogue than out of any specific "Oh, wow!" visual moments.

Comics are their own thing though, while some comic artist pride themselves on doing work that's "cinematic," there are all kind of different styles to be found.

I wasn't around for the peak of its popularity, but The X-Files was a show which by reputation had very high production values for a TV show, particularly at the time. As far as Firefly, it did have the "confined to small spaces and sets" problem that afflicts TV shows, but it did have an interesting look, lots of connected shots, long takes, gritty shaky cam, snap-zooms, rack-focuses and lens flares, shot of the ships, etc. I certainly think it was probably the most ambitious show Whedon was involved with and looked pretty damn good for a TV show which got cancelled so quickly.

I think that Abrams took quite a bit of that style when he made his Star Trek movies, to be honest, he just got a significantly larger budget.

Didn't one of the CG artists insert a shot of the Serenity vessel into a BSG episode as an in-joke at one point?

I have found that after the sugar rush of the initial viewing, most blockbuster movies age more quickly than ever these days, sometimes seeming a bit dated by the time they hit video. Once upon a time, the still-impressive transformation sequence from An American Werewolf in London or the space sequences from The Empire Strikes back set a standard everyone raced for years to match, but CG movies quickly nowadays, I think it's harder and harder for the increasingly less substantial blockbuster movies to stand the test of time.

I thought that The Avengers was at least somewhat spatially coherent. For all of the gushing has fans do about his action sequences, half the time I can't even tell who's doing what to whom in Michael Bay movies, even if I did care.

It would depend on the director's choice, look at a bleach-bypassed movie like Minority Report, it's almost entirely devoid of color. Usually when directors make decisions like that, it's for a stylistic aesthetic reason. Spielberg wanted the world of the film to have that antiseptic look. I've actually been watching some old melodramas lately, and that's in stark contrast to the way someone like Minellei, Sirk, or Nicholas Ray (or even someone like Pedro Almodovar or even Kenneth Branagh) would saturate the film as part of the whole operatic feeling.