Artificial Intelligence

The Current Cinema

A recent video posted by Insider, How Marvel Actually Makes Movies Years Before Filming, gets to the broken heart of my problem with the current blockbuster cinema, and helps to explain why the directed-by-committee focus of the modern Hollywood franchise film is so frequently devoid of originality, imagination and risk.

Focusing on the work of previsualization company The Third Floor, Inside preface their video with the following description: The Third Floor is one of the world's top visualization studios and has worked on 19 of the 23 installments in Marvel's "Infinity Saga." From previs and stuntvis to techvis and postvis, The Third Floor's work on Marvel movies runs through the entire production process. The first previsualizations of a Marvel film can begin well in advance of its release date, often before the screenplay is fully finished. Find out how Marvel visualizes its movies years before filmmaking and how this practice has helped the MCU rise its position of box-office dominance today.

The video goes on to explain that "previs" frequently occurs before directors and cinematographers have even been hired, meaning the job of a filmmaker hired to helm a Marvel movie is less about directing than merely recreating what has already been rendered as 3D, computer generated animation.

How Marvel Actually Makes Movies Years Before Filming [Insider, 2021]:

You could argue that this process is merely the modern, 21st century equivalent of the storyboard, and to an extent you would be correct. Many filmmakers, from Alfred Hitchcock to the Coen Brothers, have been known to rigorously storyboard every shot in their films prior to the production process. But the difference here is that Hitchcock, the Coen Brothers and others would sit down with a storyboard artist and translate their ideas to the page. They'd then work with cinematographers, production designers and members of the art department to turn that storyboard into a facsimile of reality.

With previsualization, it's not necessarily the traditional filmmakers that are designing and directing the movie, it's teams like The Third Floor, who are creating demo versions of the film and in the process making many of the creative decisions that inform the finished work. As one of the quoted sources in the film puts it, [the previs team are] "literally an additional director/writer/editor on the movie." With this in mind, why are we still crediting directors with the success of these films?

How Marvel Actually Makes Movies Years Before Filming [Insider, 2021]:

The uniformity of Marvel's cinema is not really a surprise at this point. That they're produced by committee is self-evident. A film like Black Panther (2018), aesthetically, looks a lot like Avengers: Endgame (2019) and Captain Marvel (also 2019), and very little like director Ryan Coogler's previous films, Fruitvale Station (2013) and Creed (2015). This is because the actual job of directing these films has already been done prior to the director coming on-board. This is why Marvel's cinema feels rote and homogenous compared to earlier, auteur-driven superhero movies like Batman Returns (1992), Unbreakable (2000) and even The Dark Knight (2008).

As one of the contributors to the Insider film puts it, "All a director has to do is be an avid viewer of their own movie," which in other words is a total dismissal or rejection of the role of the director as a creative or artistic individual, reducing it to little more than an arbiter or brand guardian.

For those that enjoy Marvel's movies as escapist spectacle, this is hardly concerning. Most audiences don't care about the role of director and aren't going to see these films for their expression of personal art, politics, or ideology. But what does it say about the role of the film critic? Marvel movies are frequently the most critically acclaimed blockbuster films released. When we have a generation of critics not just rejecting but actively ridiculing a work of personal, auteur-driven cinema, like Glass (2019) by M. Night Shymalan, then falling over themselves to praise directors for work they didn't even create, and films that were put together by artificial intelligence, like those by Marvel, then the future of cinema as anything less than a corporate, committee-driven enterprise, is seriously at risk.

Further reading at Lights in the Dusk: On contemporary cinema: Superheroes and the denial of humanity [11 October 2020], The Film Director as Superstar [15 August 2020], The Current Cinema [09 January 2020], The Popular Cinema [22 June 2019]

Superheroes

Or: why no one is waiting for The Avengers to save the day

If one positive is to come out of the current Covid-19 crisis, at least from an entertainment perspective, then let it be a total and utter disillusionment with the prevailing "superhero" cinema that has dominated the cultural discourse for the past twenty years.

At a time when real heroes are stepping forward to keep our societies from grinding to a halt or descending into outright anarchy, how are we meant to thrill at the adventures of a bunch of rubber-clad cartoon characters who routinely save the planet by destroying large chunks of it?

Characters like Batman and Iron Man – intellectually gifted billionaires with questionable politics who respectively fight crime and extraterrestrial threat, but have no inner-lives, at least nothing that is in any way human or believable – or characters like Superman and Wonder Woman – who aren't even human, and as such teach us nothing about the sacrifices and hardships that real heroes face every day.

These caricatures, lionized in contemporary art and entertainment, would be completely ineffectual against the current issues facing humanity.

Marvel's The Avengers (Avengers Assemble) [Joss Whedon, 2012]:

In movies, when "The Avengers" or "The Justice League" save the world from some mad warmonger, or quell an extraterrestrial invasion by firing a blue beam of light into the sky, they routinely leave cities destroyed, businesses lost, and lives disrupted and upturned. Because these films, and by extension the comic books that inspire them, are devoid of reality and depth, we never see the cost of this destruction.

We don't see the businesses that failed because employees were unable to go to work. We don't see the resultant economic recession that hangs over our lives for the next two decades like a black cloud. We don't see the medical staff and emergency services stretched to capacity and having to deal with the fallout from these "superheroes" and their collateral damage. We don't see the death, the grief, the public mourning. We don't see the aftereffects of post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression. We don't see the low paid but undoubtedly "key workers" that must risk their health and wellbeing to go to work each day, while the end of the world spectacle rages all around them.

What we get instead is hero worship directed towards the rich and privileged. Fictional characters who can only save the world against contrived and unnatural disasters that will literally never happen.

The real heroes aren't Iron Man or The Incredible Hulk, they're not Wonder Woman or Captain Marvel, and they're certainly not the Hollywood phonies that get paid $20 million a movie to stand in front of a greenscreen and play pretend. These people aren't saving the planet. They're self-isolating in their mansions, consoled by their wealth and celebrity, happy to sit this one out while the people that will never make half a million dollars in their entire lifetime risk life and limb to support us.

Behind the Scenes - Avengers: Infinity War [Joe & Anthony Russo, 2018]:

Photo credit: @Russo_Brothers

The next time you see a movie about some alien Übermensch, billionaire vigilante or genetically modified super soldier, ask yourself why we're not seeing our key workers depicted in the same manner. Why do we hold these ridiculous characters to a higher cultural esteem than any of the following?

All hospital staff, from doctors and nurses, surgeons and ward clerks, to cleaners, porters, security teams, IT operators, catering staff and more. Every one of them is vital to keeping our hospitals and emergency services running. Bus drivers, train drivers, delivery drivers, ambulance crews, police officers, firefighters, shelf stackers, checkout workers, cleaning operatives, funeral arrangers, coroners, childcare workers, farm workers, fruit and veg pickers, pharmacists... these are some of the lowest paid and denigrated jobs in society, and yet they're the absolute lifeblood of our society.

Absolute nobodies, like Josh Brolin, Robert Downey Jr. and Gal Gadot, or any other Hollywood celebrity playacting for a living, can accumulate a collective net worth of anywhere up to $100 million, while those who work for our emergency services get paid around 14-15k a year, and our cleaners and supermarket workers draw a minimum wage, if that! It's disgusting.

Yes, these films provide escapism, which is a necessary opiate from the oft-crushing realities that we face, however, this particular sub-genre of films has been allowed to proliferate to the detriment of stories about real heroes and the real challenges that we, as a global society, have encountered.

The Popular Cinema

A Question of Aesthetics?

What is the popular cinema in the year 2019? Is it this shot of Carol Danvers, aka Vers, aka Captain Marvel - the titular hero from the Marvel™ product of the same name - framed defiantly, with glowing white eyes and a surrounding aura of heavenly lens-flares added in post-production?

Captain Marvel [Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck, 2019]:

Or is it this shot, of Samuel L. Jackson's dead-eyed, unnatural CGI head? A bizarre and questionable bit of cinematic hocus-pocus, which brings to mind the borderline immoral horrors of another of Disney's recent atrocities, the creepy "de-aged" Princess Leia from Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), or worse, the digitally-rendered resurrection of long-dead actor Peter Cushing in the same film.

Or maybe it's whatever's happening in this shot – which apparently has no aesthetic value whatsoever.

I don't want it to seem as if I'm singling out Captain Marvel (2019) for unfair criticism here. In general I'm not the target audiences for these films, having realised very quickly that Marvel movies were not for me. However, the continuing popularity of such films among worldwide audiences makes them of particular significance when looking at the development of contemporary cinema. Marvel movies aren't just global blockbusters, they're frequently elevated by so-called professional critics to a level that now dominates the cultural discourse.

When I began writing this particular post, Captain Marvel was merely the latest instalment in the decade-long "franchise", and was generating the most attention across both mainstream and social media platforms. By the time I finish writing it, the next instalment, Avengers: Endgame (2019), will no doubt have grossed a billion dollars worldwide and garnered an unprecedented 99% critical consensus rating on the odious Rotten Tomatoes®. The world keeps turning.

While I'm not actively seeking to take anything away from the popularity of these films or besmirch the fan base in any malicious way, I do think the elevation of these movies among professional critics to the level of serious art is incredibly strange, especially since so many of these Marvel movies are mediocre, unchallenging and entirely formulaic. They're built around often incredibly conservative values, including the repeated framing of "goodness" and heroism as personified by beauty and/or physical perfection, and "evil" and villainy as personified by physical disfigurement, disability or the manifestation of the "other" (as in something alien; a safe Hollywood shorthand for "non-white/non-American.")

Worse, the films are increasingly reliant on jingoistic imagery that is pro-war and pro-military, with the worst offender, Iron Man (2008), setting-up an obvious proxy version of the Taliban in order to exploit the realities of the Iraq war and present its protagonist - billionaire weapons designer Tony Stark - as a kind of white (American) saviour. Given the context of Marvel's previous cinematic endeavours, I don't think it's an accident that several shots from the Captain Marvel trailer look as if they've been lifted from an Air Force recruitment video.

Iron Man [Jon Favreau, 2008]:

Commentary or exploitation? Iron Man as the American liberator; bringing peace to a Hollywood facsimile of the Middle-East through a particular brand of violent aggression; destroying entire cities but getting the job done! You can almost imagine parts of the film with the same soundtrack as Trey Parker's brilliantly satirical Team America: World Police (2004).

Captain Marvel [Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck, 2019]:

Korean War Era US Air Force Recruitment Poster [Norman Rockwell, 1951]:

Captain Marvel meets the Air Force [Stephen Losey/Air Force Times, 2018]:

While once important films like The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Manhattan (1979) get cancelled for being "problematic", the propagandist or fascistic elements of the modern Marvel cinema pose no problems for the contemporary critic. Such people are content to suspend the same sense of moral outrage when faced with the latest Disney-backed offering; praising yet another identikit narrative about some physically and intellectually superior, American personified, military sponsored Übermensch, and their battles against a dehumanised alien oppressor who must be stopped, usually by means of destroying an entire city (with no human casualties?) and shooting a beam of light into the sky.

The same critics have similarly lowered the bar in terms of what passes for serious filmmaking. Marvel movies are at best competent, but they could also be described as bland, televisual and entirely reliant on conventional methods of coverage. The imagery, even at its most fantastical, is often boring and familiar; like an endless demo reel from a particular VFX company that keeps repeating itself. Unlike blockbusters of yesteryear, such as The Exorcist (1973), Jaws (1975), Star Wars (1977), etc, these Marvel movies provide no iconic imagery, their soundtracks are unmemorable and their characters lazily coast off the legacy of an available source material. The entire look and feel of Marvel's cinema is the result of a very strict house-style suggestive of committee-level filmmaking. Whether their films are directed by Jon Favreau, Kenneth Branagh, Joss Whedon or others, they have a uniformity to them; a sense that their respective makers are not artists or auteurs, but brand guardians.

The Marvel films I've seen have been interchangeable, mechanical and devoid of aesthetic worth. They might thrill on a level of action and spectacle - they might even convince us that their characters have depth and personality because they drop a few quips or wisecracks from time to time - but so what? When the result is a cinema that feels as if it's being created by an artificial intelligence system, predicted by various market-research algorithms and rendered before our very eyes, shouldn't those that position themselves as the gatekeepers of popular culture be asking for something more?

Avengers 2: Age of Ultron [Joss Whedon, 2015]:

The above images are part of a single shot taken from Avengers 2: Age of Ultron (2015). In the vulgar parlance, this frame is effectively the "money shot"; it's the moment when all the heroes come together to flex their superior might. In context, it could be exciting, even awe-inspiring, but looked at as an aesthetic object, or as a piece of craftsmanship, it's dreadful; the incompetence of this imagery is overwhelming. Compare this absolutely ridiculous visual to any of the great images from the classic blockbuster cinema of the past fifty years and it starts to feel as if the bar for critical approval has never been lower. If a film containing such a moment of complete cinematic kitsch can be acclaimed by the majority of professional reviewers as if somehow comparable to the Odessa steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin (1925), the confrontation between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) or the Tyrannosaurus attack scene in Jurassic Park (1993), then it's safe to assume that the rules of the game have been rigged.

Obviously audiences aren't wrong to enjoy these films, but when you have images that are as tasteless, impersonal and disorganised as the ones shown here, isn't it the responsibility of the critic to hold such works to a higher standard? A film practically engineered to appeal to the widest possible audience and guaranteed to generate billions in revenue doesn't need the fawning adoration of people who could use their platform to celebrate innovation and risk in the popular cinema, instead of falling on it like an angry mob (as if they're forced to play the defensive for an already bulletproof corporate entity that demands total industry dominance.)

Case in point, Glass (2019) by M. Night Shyamalan. A superhero movie that not only attempts to deconstruct and demystify the conventions of the genre in a visually expressive, almost experimental way, but a film that also acts as a kind of clarion call against the jaded disaffection of the modern world under the presidency of Donald J. Trump. At a time of great cynicism and widening divides between every stratum of society, Glass is a hopeful and optimistic film about giving power back to the powerless, rejecting corporate hegemony and recognising that the people we see as the monsters in society (the "broken", the sick, the disabled) are often the victims of a system that facilitates conformity and social exclusion. Of course, faced with a film that wilfully disregards the popular narrative and refuses to satisfy the all important expectations of genre, or "brand", the critics hated it; and yet Glass remains a fascinating, personal and uniquely cinematic work.

Glass [M. Night Shyamalan, 2019]:

Glass, which received 36% among critics on the aforementioned Rotten Tomatoes - compared to 80% for Captain Marvel and 75% for Avengers 2 - is not a film without flaws. The first twenty-minutes are front-loaded with enough action and plot machinations to sustain an entire feature - which creates a comparative feeling of inertia during the more talkative and claustrophobic second act - and it occasionally feels unfocused; attempting to tie up a trilogy's worth of plot-lines while also maintaining its own narrative thread. Compared to its predecessors, the landmark Unbreakable (2000) and the excellent Split (2017), Glass is the weakest of the three films. However, it's also a work that attempts to explore ideas and emotions that other, more mainstream superhero movies, would see as surplus to requirement.

The popular criticisms of Glass among professional reviewers include the film's lack of action, its intimate scale and an over-reliance on a single location. None of these criticisms are actually negative in nature unless we're actively comparing the film, unfavourably, to the standards of what came before; specifically, Marvel's product (and why would critics consciously do this, unless part of an agenda?). The cardinal sin that Shyamlan committed was to make a superhero movie that didn't conform to the popular paradigm; his auteurist leanings and commitment to lower-budgeted cinema was an affront to the corporate ideology that mainstream critics now work to promote.

Unbreakable [M. Night Shyamalan, 2000]:

Turning the comic book movie upside-down; Unbreakable is a film that predicted the trend for self-serious superhero cinema by almost a decade. Dismissed by short-sighted critics at the time as little more than "The Sixth Sense Part II", Shyamalan's film is now a key text in the evolution of the sub-genre; it's arguably the Blade Runner (1982) of the modern superhero movie.

Like much of Shyamalan's cinema, Glass is a film about self-acceptance and empowerment; about rejecting the narrative that's created by governments, corporations and bullies, and instead recognising our own abilities and the characteristics that make us different. It's a hopeful film about communities coming together through grief to create a positive social force. Given the present political landscape and the conversations about self-identity - the attitude of expressing one's own truth, best epitomised by the song "This Is Me" from The Greatest Showman (2017) - it's difficult to think of a more relevant film in the context of the current zeitgeist.

Instead of elevating the hundred-million dollar corporate product that idolises the military war machine and makes heroes out of an embodiment of physical and intellectual perfection, would it not be more beneficial to the cinema, if not society, to elevate and reward the personal, self-financed film that questions the intentions of large corporations and, in its final moments, makes heroes out of characters placed in a mental hospital and demonised as monsters? Would it not be to the betterment of the popular cinema if, instead of rewarding conformity and/or denigrating eccentricity, professional critics were expected to call out films that present monoform or uninteresting aesthetics, and to praise the films and filmmakers that take personal risks?

For me, the popular cinema in 2019 should be aspiring to something closer to Shyamalan's recent work than the mediocrities of Marvel. It should be striving to put on screen images that are intelligently framed and composed with an eye for perspective, lines and texture; it should be aiming to use colour in a way that is expressive of emotions and ideas; it should be seeking to bring back the sheer spectacle of watching a great actor give a thrilling performance, where the physicality of the craft is its own special effect.