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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

> Everyone is lit perfectly and filmed digitally on raw and tweaked to perfection. It makes everything have a fake feeling to it.

It wasn’t until I started watching “Stuntmen React” videos on Corridor’s channel recently that I realized people are even still doing stunts. The footage in modern movies is so massaged and strangely well lit that it feels fake to the point that it might as well be the CG as I’d assumed it was.

You’re not getting the visual benefit to justify injuring these poor stunt people when it doesn’t even feel realistic at the end. Needs some grit, some imperfections. The things that made Jackie Chan’s early work so amazing.

They just don’t feel like they’re really happening, so there is no weight to it.

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> You’re not getting the benefit of injuring these poor stuntmen

As someone who knows a lot of stunt people, I'd just like to point out that the benefit is not in injuring them, it's in the effortless action scenes. But yes, a byproduct of the action are the injuries.

We really need to credit stunt people better. They're the most likely to actually lose their lives during filming. Hence why some are pushing for a stunt category in the Oscars: https://movieweb.com/best-stunt-oscars-needed-why/

That's not at all what he meant. He was saying that in both cases the stunt man is getting injured, but in the case of digital it doesn't look better than CGI, so at that point why not just do CGI and eliminate the injuries.

I worded that somewhat poorly. I didn’t mean to insinuate that injuring them was the goal, I meant to say we are not getting benefit from the final product that justifies the means. I have reworded the post.

To my point though, the “effortless action” is the problem, the final product of all this work and effort feels effortless in that it feels floaty, fake and without consequence. You don’t watch a modern fight scene and get the visceral reaction older things bring.

I was watching through the Marvel movies just to catch up. Mostly I was surfing on my phone at the same time, as they're not that engaging. At one point during Winter Soldier though I caught myself having put down the phone and was sitting on the edge of my sofa, fully engaged in the action scene with an elevated heart rate.

Some time later I saw the "Stuntmen React" where they went through the scene, and it suddenly all made sense: that whole scene, the chase/fight on the overpass, was almost entirely practical stunts.

The John Wick movies have spoiled me for this exact reason; too many cuts in a fight sequence, and it feels jarring and unreal. It's sort of counterintuitive, but long uncut sequences demonstrating the quality of the choreography really ramps up the tension (IMO).

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