Hacker Cinema
Moonshot
2022 · Film · 104 min
Directed by Christopher Winterbauer
In a future where Mars is terraformed and colonized by the best humanity has to offer, two very different college students wind up joining forces and sneak onboard a space shuttle to the red planet in order to be united with their significant others.
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3 comments on Hacker News
> The Moonshot still is CLEARLY using color with great intention. It's not a realistic scene. It's a carefully designed shot. The characters, the coffee, and the table are yellow. The background is green. That's interesting.
I would be much more inclined to agree with that if every fucking movie in the past twenty years wasn't also using the exact same gold-cyan two-color palette: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OrangeBlueContrast
It's just lazy. There's nothing interesting about it. Because every movie has a digital color pass applied now, they feel obligated to do something with the color, but they have no idea what, so they just do the same thing over and over.
I don't really care about technical specs of cameras or film or whatever, but I think the author is largely just wrong. At least on their comparison between Moonshot and When Harry Met Sally. Those are just different films. The Moonshot still is CLEARLY using color with great intention. It's not a realistic scene. It's a carefully designed shot. The characters, the coffee, and the table are yellow. The background is green. That's interesting. It makes the scene feel very small and intimate. The Harry diner scene is cluttered and chaotic. You have a bunch of background characters that add to the scene by looking at the main characters. You get a lot from this still. That's also interesting.
I have not seen any of these films
The author doesn't address that blockbuster movies have always found a "trendy look" and run with it. Is what she claims Netflix is doing any different than any other popular cycle in filmmaking?
"It's actually, specifically, about how movies these days look. That is, more flat, more fake, over-saturated, or else over-filtered, like an Instagram photo in 2012, but rendered in commercial-like high-def."
The "2012 Instagram filter" was pulled from the same playbook as the popular movies of the 2000-2010 era. However, the author isn't arguing that this trend has been taken too far; just stating that everything looks bland and the same. Of course, it does. Only some movies are original and try something new because audiences like familiar things. Successful visual storytelling methods are recycled just the same as scripts.
When comparing "When Harry Met Sally" and "Moonshot" the author says,
"... The latter is more polished and "perfect," but to what effect? It looks strange, surreal, both dim and bright at the same time. Everything is inexplicably blue or yellow, and glows like it's been FaceTuned. Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal, meanwhile, are sitting in a downtown New York deli that actually exists. The image is a little grainy, the lighting falling somewhere in the normal daytime range, and they look like regular human beings. ..."
One is a science fiction film the other is set in a New York deli. So they both don't want to evoke the same feeling in the setting to the audience.
I had to stop reading when the author said,
"At the risk of using an anonymous Redditor as an expert, lol, I found a comment under a thread called "Why do movies look so weird now?" that captures a lot of these same complaints:"
Then she goes on quote the Reddit comment. LOL right? The Redditor's comment was a single paragraph and summed up the author's entire point of view. She just went on to write a longer post that failed to say anything additional. Read the Reddit comment she quoted and skip the article.