Or really, just to Look Cool And Technical And Shit.
[1]: https://www.theterminatorfans.com/the-terminator-vision-hud-...
How many times has Lord of the Rings been revised? Dune? <Insert other long-lived actively managed novel>. Is the active management of these novels "wrong"? Is fixing grammar, spelling, or clarifying story beats "wrong"?
I personally don't think so, and I'd rather read something which has been corrected, especially if done for story clarity.
In the vast majority of cases it’s “fixing” the original in this sense;
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/18/painting-match...
Also, it’s important to be able to see these works as originally published. Otherwise, you are passing off a forgery as the original.
Normal viewers almost never notice these things, and movie nerds like little glimpses behind the curtain. So it’s doing almost nothing for one sort of viewer, and making it worse for another.
I was told about the pole that causes the truck to flip in Raiders of the Lost Ark and now I can't unsee it.
—Warning to those who enjoy 2001 A Space Odyssey with their blinders on...—
2001 made a big impression on me as a kid and I've seen it many times. There was a point when watching for the Nth time in middle age that I first noticed that all the anti-gravity shots show the actors bodies carrying their own weight. Especially in the aisle scene with the floating pen, which itself is rotating about the center of the sheet of clear plastic it's attached to rather than its center of mass. Later in the same sequence, food trays are brought to the bridge after the long scenes of a flight attendant, who picks up trays as they slide downs from a dispenser, and as she hands the trays to the crew, one of them instinctively puts his hand out under the tray to helpfully catch its weight. In the next scene an officer joins other crew by coming up from behind them, leaning over and resting his arms on their chair backs as the scene cuts to details of anti-gravity meal consumption. Finally Floyd stands in front of a toilet reading a 1000 word hard-printed list of instructions after the viewer has been shown electronic displays used everywhere else. The self-consciousness of that clip provides a lovely relief from all the previous cognitive dissonance. I'm not able to unsee any of this now and it detracts from the spectacle. But at the same time, it makes the orchestration and ideas of the movie seem all the more artistic, so nothing lost except innocence. There are many other oddities to find in the movie working on different planes of awareness, including proprioceptive assumptions about reality, intelligence, progress, and spirituality.
We had very little experience with zero g at the time, and surely Kubrick and his crew had zero. They did a remarkable job despite that.
Is this one clearly wrong? As you say, it's essentially an instinctive motion, so one can easily imagine the reflex taking over even if the scene were genuinely in zero gravity.
It's really not the equivalent though. I don't see anything wrong with fixing a license plate or removing a reflection or a modern-day wristwatch.
It's the equivalent of fixing a spelling error in a novel, or a wrong chord in sheet music. None of the filmmakers wanted those things there. They weren't done with intent. They were just mistakes.
Changing music or replacing a puppet with CG, of course I'm against. That's changing the art of it. Different music makes you feel different. A CG creature has a different personality. Just like you don't want to replace vocabulary in a novel to make it more modern-day.
I think it's usually pretty easy to distinguish the two. The first ones would have been corrected at the time if they'd noticed and gone for another take. They take us out of the movie if we notice them. The latter category is a reflection of the technology, resources, and intentional choices. They keep us in the world of moviemaking as it was at that time.
With blogs that take screenshots of 4K content though, sometimes that's using a media player with poor HDR color decoding though. Bad HDR always winds up with a green tint, that's the telltale sign. VLC is the worst with that.
But I don't think that's the case here. There are definitely a lot of rereleases with badly done color.
Though in this day and age I can’t help but ask “why not both?” It feels easy to add a choice to your viewing experience. If they can do it for Black Mirror then they can certainly ask up front “which version would you like to see?”
I was surprised to learn that this is a thing and has been for a long time.
https://old.reddit.com/r/FrostbiteFalls/comments/1flr8ue/fra...
As for the people responsible: You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!
Your analogies don't pass a simple self-check-- they are vastly different in scope.
At worst a spelling error will create a single alternative spelling in history. Wrong chords, however, typically create entire branches of full pieces of music that include allusions to and variations upon the wrong chord. For example-- there's no way to "correct" the C major chord in Rachmaninoff's Variations on a Theme by Chopin. What are you going to do, change every single variation in Rachmaninoff's piece to reflect the correct chord (C minor) from Chopin's prelude?
It gets even more complicated in jazz where chord substitutions are not only expected but often supersede the original chords. Even more to the point-- a lot of the die-hard Charlie Parker fans not only love the recording he made while obviously drunk, they love it in spite of Parker's wishes for nobody to ever hear it it (much less repeatedly play it and talk about it).
That's all to say a) correcting an entrenched wrong chord is no simplistic task, and b) in any case it's wrong to assume that the artist's intentions are always the chief concern.
And that's just one example that film is full of those. Here is another jarring one https://files.catbox.moe/9m3gjq.mp4
Despite that it won the Academy Award for Best Editing...
Very few such sequences complete without my noticing some spot where shots don’t match up.
Another one is key lights reflected in eyeballs. Nearly ruins Jackson’s LOTR trilogy for me, it’s in basically every damn scene. In several shots you can practically diagram out their whole lighting rig from a the reflections on an actor’s eye, so many lights are plainly and distinctly visible. You see it some in lots of movies but OMG it’s bad in those.
As a music fan, I really love little mistakes in incredible albums. They’re humanizing, they show that the recording was made by people and it makes the highs feel so much higher.
As an artist, I loathe mistakes in my own work and I will spend a basically limitless amount of time fixing annoying performance quirks in software — I’m talking things that I can do but didn’t get quite right — so I can listen to it without distraction or regrets. I know that nobody will notice these except me and the type of listener who does catch them will either not mind or appreciate it the way I would. But when it’s my own work, it’s different. I’m sure it’s the same for filmmakers so I understand the impulse to fix it later.
the_af•2h ago
With Star Wars in particular, Lucas' incessant meddling has long have gone far past the point of diminishing returns, and frequently making the movies worse.
More in general, I like watching the original movie, warts and all. I often disagree with the corrections, especially when they restore scenes that were left out for a reason, make color correction choices I disagree with (e.g. Blade Runner's "green tint" is inferior to its original bluish tint), etc.
pnw•2h ago
hammock•1h ago
It’s especially worse since the hit rate of actually good, creative movies is so much lower in the digital era.
My big pet peeve now is these “ew, this movie looks old” attitude.
I was watching Sum of All Fears the other day and my partner had this attitude. Funny though as soon as people in tuxedos showed up on the screen she changed her mind and started watching. Tuxedos are one of those movie magic things.
jimbokun•1h ago
alabastervlog•57m ago
It’s so much more impressive when they had to actually arrange for the thing you’re seeing to exist, at least in some sense, in real life, so light could bounce off it and hit the film. That is a real landscape that the actors and crew had to travel to! They really made horses jump off that train car! They really had two thousand extras for this shot! That kind of thing. If there was a set at least they had to build it, and even if the results look a little janky it’s usually interesting and the craft impressive.
They shot with environmental lighting? They had to rig their other lights just so and maybe just work with what was available to get a good shot. The light is the light. The constraints on their options often seem to improve, rather than harm, the final product.
Now it’s like oh they couldn’t even be bothered to film on a real damn street. Ugh. All the location shooting is just getting backgrounds to composite in later. The light on the actors didn’t even exist when and where the background was shot. It sucks and is boring.
neckro23•1h ago
(By contrast, the 4k of Alien looks fantastic.)
phreack•1h ago
jimbokun•1h ago