I’m not sure where “almost” comes into it. Killmonger was right, as proved by the ending of the movie. Killmonger was doing the wrong thing for the right reasons, and his actions changed T’Challa and his view on the world. I hope that would be enough to make you think after leaving the theater.
Something doesn’t have to be “on par with Scorsese’s best stuff” to make you think or to be worthwhile. That’s kind of a high bar to clear. A generation ago, I’m sure there were people who bemoaned gangster movies and how people were spending more time at the movies and less time actually reading books. “I mean, movies where a bunch of people get shot are fine as shallow entertainment, but they aren’t really on par with Shakespeare’s best work.”
Count me in with Malkav’s group: I go to movies for the shared experience more than anything else. A bunch of people being thoughtful in a theater does nothing for me, but a bunch of people laughing or cheering or screaming isn’t something I can get at home.
CG is a filmmaking tool, nothing more. Saying “I think CG is kind of boring” makes as much sense as saying “I think matte paintings are kind of boring”. No one would ever say, “I don’t go to movies with anamorphic lenses; I’d rather see a more thoughtful movie.” Hell, they used CG in Casino, and it’s even used in The Irishman.
So let me rephrase it: I think action sequences that rely on CG to elevate them are kind of boring.
Movies need to be interesting in the parts between the action sequences. Those should be the real draw. The action stuff should just be the fun icing. When the movie is mostly about getting to the next action scene, I lose interest.
Does any MCU movie really compare to Eastwood’s Unforgiven? Unforgiven is about the characters, their dialog, their interaction. The action stuff just punctuates that.
Anyway, I’ve enjoyed some MCU movies but they have never seemed memorable. I don’t really remember any of the dialog and just a scene here and there. And I grew up with Marvel Comics and collected some for a bit. I have a great fondness for them, but the movies seem so forgettable.
I get what you’re saying to some extent, but there’s no reason to single out CG in that statement. If you feel like action sequences are boring, then they’re boring whether or not CG is involved.
Didn’t you say that you haven’t seen the majority of Marvel movies? It seems like you’re making a lot of assumptions about something you haven’t actually watched. I know people who hated Goodfellas because of “all the violence”, or who think that mafia movies are just about a bunch of people getting shot at the end (which, to be fair, a lot of them are). But movies can still be character-driven, even with a lot of action or violence.
Again, I think it’s unfair to say, “Oh, do any Marvel movies compare to ?” Yes, Unforgiven is a fantastic movie about the consequences of romanticizing violence, and whether or not you can actually run away from your past. And Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is a fantastic movie about abusive relationships and whether or not you deserve to love or be loved. It’s a movie about the characters, their dialog, and their interaction. It just also happens to have some great action scenes on top of that. And the most emotional scenes in the movie involve a CG raccoon.
Black Panther made me think. It was like nothing I had ever seen before, and I didn’t think I would ever see anything like it in my lifetime. It’s simply not an experience I took for granted. It meant a lot, but I suspect a lot of people just won’t… see that, including Scorsese.
A director talks about how monopoly harms the movie industry in general; concludes that superheroes are to blame. Right, right.
I also found it funny how he mentions that North by Northwest is kinda like all of those blockbusters but there he liked the character. After that, it was hard to not imagine “old man yells at cloud” meme.
What movie did you watch? Killmonger wasn’t right. He wanted to go to war with the world. T’Challa’s dad was wrong. He wanted to keep Wakanda locked away. Lupita Nyong’o’s Nakia was right. She advocated for Wakanda to end its isolationist stance - which is exactly what T’Challa did at the end of the movie.
As others noted, this isn’t really about CG then. It is about direction, blocking, etc. the reason Michael Bay’s Transformer movies are terrible action isn’t because of the CG, but because of the way they are filmed. The cuts, the framing, the decisions made in how to depict the action are all borderline incoherent.
Compare that to something like the hallway fight in Daredevil S1, or the bathroom fight in Mission Impossible Fallout, or a massive list of non American films like The Raid or Ip Man where the filming is very intentional in telling a story. The movements and action have impacts that reveal something about the character. There are effects that linger. Some of these used CG and some did not. But it was never the presence or absence of CG, it was all the thought about how the action is used to convey something.
Here is a video I watched recently that goes into the craft of making action sequences, and why some work better than others
As a counterpoint, most action sequences in CG heavy blockbusters tend to be horribly directed (including everything I’ve seen in the MCU except stuff in the animated Spiderman). I think it’s because heavy CG:
1- Remove constraints by the directors. You can do anything so that you don’t need to think that much about how to resolve a problem/show a beat.
2- Are actually not “directed” by the directors themselves, but in many cases planned and proposed by the CG teams, with varying amounts of input by the directors themselves. But they are commonly seen as a technical challenge and not necessarily part of the core storytelling exercise. This shows form the script phase.
As a counterpoint with amazing action sequences that are not only well directed, but are also dramatically fundamental for the development of the story (that is, important stuff other than characters dying happens in them) I propose Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. That movie is unintelligible without the action sequences, because all the important story beats happen in them.
I’d just like to put in a word for films where the fight scenes don’t necessarily tell you much about a character but are just bloody amazing in their own right (any good Jackie Chan film say).
In a “how the hell did they think this would work at all” way. Yes. Man, what a stupid film (imho, obviously). I enjoyed the first 2/3rds of the first one a lot, but this was bad.
That would make a pretty awesome computer vision challenge. Take in a movie, figure out the 3d model of the sets and characters, and then re-render in the style of a different director. Taking style transfer to the Nth level.
