Really ugly film
Grainy with an ugly tint. Makes it hard to watch.
shareYeh I dont understand why they did that. Very distracting
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MovieChat Forums > Minority Report (2002) Discussion > Really ugly film
Indeed, the film has a very grainy and seedy look. I found this interesting:
Minority Report's cinematography was modeled after the seedy aesthetic of film noir. Director Steven Spielberg said, "I want to make the ugliest, dirtiest movie I had ever made. I want this movie to be dark and grainy, and to be really cold. This is the rough and tumble, gritty world of film noir." To accomplish this, the cinematographer, Janus Kaminski used a specific set of lenses and filters so "the highlights got slightly brighter and the colors got slightly more pastel-ish. We wanted to create a world that feels realistic, kind of seedy, full of shadows. We wanted it to be a dangerous world. He decided to use a bleach bypass system on the film, a process that skips the normal beaching of emulsion on a negative, causing intense desaturation whereby the movie looks like a color and black and white image simultaneously. The result is a grainy film full of dark shadows, little color and blown out lights. In a word: bleak.
Film noir has its roots in German expressionism, an artistic movement which coincided with WW1, that used dramatic, high contrast lightning, also know as chiaroscuro lighting, to capture the darkness and overall atmosphere brought on by the psychological effects of oppression and war. It's no coincidence then that noir began to gain popularity in America around the time WW2 began to ramp up. The film noir style, then, was usually used to enhance the seediness and immorality in a story. Shades of grey, dark shadows, low and dutch angles. The mental resonance of a world in disarray, of a society losing its grip on some normative form of sanity. Grappling with what's moral, immoral.
The film's aesthetic encapsulates that postmodern existential nihilism. The spiritually vacuous and hedonistic aura as society chases pleasure and consumerism through inescapable advertising. There is no integrity, no structure, only subjective freedom leading to despair. The film posits the question, "what becomes of humanity when meaninglessness and nothingness replaces the narratives of civilization?" share
When Spielberg was going through his "overblown whites" phase. He did the same thing in War of the Worlds.
shareI think "overblown whites" describes every movie shot by Janusz Kamiński who has been cinematographer on all of Spielberg's movies since Schindler's List.
shareI so wish Spielberg would work with a different cinematographer.
Schindler’s List is beyond beautiful, but other than that I haven’t liked the look of a Spielberg movie in a long time.
It's OK to be overblown white.
shareYeah I wish it looked more normal.
shareIKR?? I remember watching Scream 4 and they did a very similar thing... a guy said that it seems like they put some "vaseline on the lens" why they do that? It looks very bad
shareIt's visually a piece of hideous-looking, amateurish-looking crap, a complete disgrace in terms of cinematography. It looks exactly like what you'd expect a person trying out video editing software for the first time would put out.
shareThat was my impression of the film when I first watched it - horrendously dreary and bleak looking film, to the point where it overwhelmed the story. That, and Colin Farrell's overacting.
I was never a fan of Janusz Kaminski's cinematography on Spielberg's films. Just look at the difference between Jurassic Park and The Lost World. One is a visual feast for the eyes, the other looks like shit run over twice. Same goes for Saving Private Ryan, another horrendous looking film.