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Comment by zfxfr | Hacker News Reader

I am pretty sure I already watched the movie a long time ago. I can't say whether it is good or bad because I forgot the story. Maybe I 'll watch it again because I really like Keanu Reeve. But I don't think I will watch this black and white version. Also I don't understand why it seems to be such a feat to have removed the colors from this movie ? I am not a computer graphic expert I just do some coding for fun and play with image editing software (I dabbled in the demoscene) and I don't think it is that hard to turn a picture into grayscale or is it ?

>The black-and-white knocks several million dollars off of the price tag.

Yes I bet it does ! But I genuinely don't understand why would people will watched a degraded version of a movie ?

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The article didn't go into too many details about why it worked better, but these excerpts gesture at why:

"dialing up Gibson’s cyberpunk paranoia"

"the three computer graphic sections become quite coherent in black-and-white"

"it has this kind of a dreamy, 16mm feel to it. It reminds me of Tetsuo and Eraserhead, and all these great, kind of dreamy, black-and-white movies."

"the color graphics now look all pretty retro, but in black-and-white, it has its own quality to it for sure."

"I take inspiration from films like Alphaville, La Jetée, things like that"

My impression is that the color version sets an expectations that Longo never meant. It was always intended as a B&W art film, and not as a summer block-buster. The colors and expense were a distraction.

So, if you haven't yet, check out the movies mentioned. Ironman: Tetsuo, Eraserhead, Alphaville and La Jetée. They are definitely not Hollywood blockbusters.

I'm not sure that Eraserhead has any overlap with Johnny Mnemonic in anything other than this mention of dreamy colours (military-bleak is how I'd describe Eraserheads palette).

I can't speak for the others in your list, but Eraserhead is an art experience that requires some... endurance of the horrific, depending on how much one invests themselves into what's going on on screen.

Maybe try watching the b&w version with an open mind and it's possible those connections will be clearer to you.

If you take a clip and run it through a desaturation filter it will look aweful. To properly turn an image or a clip into black-and-white, it needs to be done by hand.

Now you have to do this manually for the whole movie. Every scene has to be done separately. But also, it has to be done in a way that is self consistent throughout the movie.

OTOH, I can't imagine enjoying Casablanca in color. Or Citizen Kane, Thin Man, or African Queen. B&W is part of a film's atmosphere, it's different.

I'd never want to see Forbidden Planet in B&W ... and The Day the Earth Stood Still in color? criminal!

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