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Comment by anonporridge | Hacker News Reader

The great thing about Gattaca is that the cinematography ages incredibly well on top of the amazing plot.

A lot of great sci-fi is marred by cheap effects that look incredibly dated only a decade later. Gattaca chose to focus on the story and create a minimalist future environment that still looks beautiful 25 years later.

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Despite Gattaca being one of my favorite movies for years I only recently learned, right here on HN, that the cinematographer is Sławomir Idziak, frequent collaborator of Krzysztof Kieślowski, which explains why Gattaca looks so much like one of my other favorites, The Double Life of Veronique.

> create a minimalist future environment that still looks beautiful 25 years later.

See also: Dark City

And for the love of god, watch the directors cut of `Dark City`, not the cinema version.

I watched the cinema version and found it outstanding. What are the changes in the director's cut?

I second this, I love dark city and never knew there was s director's cut.

The main reason director's cut is recommended for first-time viewers is theatrical version having an intro that reveals many elements. That said the list of all the differences is quite extensive: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118929/alternateversions/.

Interesting. Will definitely watch the director's cut.

I must say though that I don't think the opening monologue reveals too much. It reveals something but the city still feels weird, you don't truly understand the strangers' goals at the beginning, and there are still plot twists. If you don't even know about the strangers at the beginning, I wonder how the movie would play... a pity I cannot wipe my own memories and re-experience it ;)

A general rule of thumb that I've adopted is to intentionally skip the first 10 minutes of any movie.

This happened accidentally with Memento [0], it it became an incredible film. Without all that setup in the first scene, you exist with the protagonist as he discovers his world.

I've tried it with other films and they give away too much information, you the viewer are practically handed the whole script.

Give it a shot, you might like doing it that way.

[0][https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0209144/ ]

I observed a similar effect with University lectures: being there from the start I often lost myself in some embarrassing state of deep distraction, but when I missed the beginning I went into attentive panic to make up for what I missed that echoed on even after I fetched up.

The difference between university lectures and movies is, of course, that one is not normally trying to derive a lesson from a movie; there's nothing to "optimize". Every part of the movie is necessary unlike a lesson.

So you use the Wadsworth constant on movies?

"The Wadsworth Constant is the idea (and 2011 meme) that one can safely skip past the first 30 percent of any YouTube video without missing any important content."

I don't quite think the UI_at_80x24 constant has the same ring to it.

I really don’t see how that changes Memento.

Part of the tension is knowing Leonard is going to kill Teddy, we just don’t know why.

I think it does change Memento... for the worse. The beginning is a powerful, integral part of the movie.

Skipping the first 10 minutes is like skipping the last 10, "I just know where this is going anyway". Nope. So much can happen in 10 minutes! Plus, you know, they filmed that part for a reason.

It's also like skipping the first chapter of a book: sure, some books would be improved by trimming their clumsy beginnings, but good books aren't.

Yea, it's just an incredibly silly "general rule of thumb".

I think skipping the beginning of Memento is a mistake. It's a powerful beginning that sets up expectations (the movie is "pre ordained", but we just don't understand why) but at the same time it explains nothing.

In general, I disagree with your rule of thumb. My favorite movies have cool beginnings, and it'd be a shame to miss them.

Just don't do it with The Lobster.

The first scene really drew me in to wondering WTF is this movie going to be about?!

The first scene created the mystery. One of my favourite movie openings.

In the past, I used to rent DVDs for director’s cut where the director explains the scenes. Do we still have rental services where we can get director’s cut DVDs?

I have never watched the directors cut of any movie. This will be my first.

Director’s cuts and Director’s (and actor’s) commentaries are a good reason to still buy physical media.

These are also available on the high seas as I found after posting this comment.

it's too bad so much goes missing from the original DVD / Blu-ray - not even sure if the streaming releases are cut further or not.

Probably there's also less effort in collecting and making this content available.

Also check out the one for Bladerunner.

Arguably, the theatrical version of Blade Runner is better for first-time viewers, because the voiceover explains a lot of stuff they don't understand.

Fans almost always say they prefer the DC (or actually the "Final Cut"), but my theory is that their opinion isn't really valid because they all saw the theatrical version first, so upon viewing the later cuts, they had the benefit of already knowing the story and background, and of course they can't just forget that when watching a voiceover-less cut.

I'm not one of those who saw the theatrical version. I didn't see the movie until much later in my life. I think actually read an article about how the "Final Cut" is Ridley Scott's "true vision" for the film before I actually saw it. That prompted me to go track it down and watch it for the first time with that version.

So, I've never actually seen the theatrical version with the voiceover. However, I don't believe there's anything in the film that I don't understand. I understood the symbolism and the message that was being conveyed. I'm being deliberately vague here because I don't want to spoil it for any random reader who might see this.

I don't think there's anything particularly difficult to understand about the film. Perhaps you think I am giving people too much credit? I don't think I am. There are lots of films out there with deeper meanings and hidden ideas/messages. There are lots of very critical viewers out there who pay attention and don't need everything spelled out for them. These are also the people most likely to get annoyed when a voiceover spoils it for them.

I had no idea about the Kieslowski connection, wow. I follow his other great collaborator, composer Zbigniew Preisner, where if you take anyone involved with Kieslowski chances are it's going to be a good film. I have his tri coleurs and decalogue on dvd, and double vie on vhs in a box somewhere. Strange to think when these things were artifacts now that nothing is, and that they could even be somewhat rare. I have the original House of Cards series on dvd in that box, The Big Sleep and other classics as well.

Kieslowski's "thou shall not kill" and "thou shall have no other god" from Decalogue remain some of the most haunting films I've seen.

Dark City is one of my favorite movies.

Generally, movies that focus on set design age much better than movies that focus on effects. If you make a good set, it will look good no matter how technically advanced your setup is. It may look better when filmed using the latest cameras, but it will never look wrong when it isn't, because it is the real thing. Effects are not the real thing, and as technology improved people have gotten better at noticing and are less tolerant of the details that make it look fake, that's what makes them look dated.

it's why I think the Farscape puppets were absolutely genius. They look so timeless compared to a lot of the heavy CGI use during that era of TV sci-fi.

Farscape is criminally under rated/known! It’s also amusing that SG1 ended up with two of the leads from it too for a bit.

Leading to the best joke in the Episode 200.

I like Farscape very much, but, to be fair, the really good episodes were few and far between. You had to slog through a lot of sub-par episodes, and people can be forgiven for not really taking to it because of that.

It's really a shame that Farscape didn't have stronger writing because the whole puppets and minimal effects thing works pretty well. (I can forgive Season 1 a bit as the actors and the writers were still figuring out the characters. Season 2 and forward sub-par episodes were all on the writers.)

However, as I understand it, the problem with the puppets is that they are expensive.

No upres issues either like what happened with Babylon 5 when they did the hd transfers for dvd.

You mean they dont still use 1980s computer screens in 22nd century Star Trek?

For how bad much of the computer imagery has changed, the overall bridge sets in the TOS films look a -lot- better to me than all of the fancy CGI stuff.

All of that said...

There's a certain correctness in my head to the idea that in a pre-replicator future [0], it would be more smart to use a bunch of physical buttons and CRT type monitors.

The main reason that comes to mind, is that a simple CRT is probably easier to fabricate on a deep space mission than a flat screen, if it needs replacement. Similar for all the buttons/lights/switches.

Now, it wouldn't necessarily be -easy- for a ship in deep space to re-fab these components. Thus the need for 'low-fi' graphics, since you might be in a region where the best your folks can fab is NTSC-quality.

[0] - While TOS had food synthesizers, that seems like a subset of a full replicator's functionality.

TOS had famously low budget fake "high school theater" quality sets. They are only tolerated because the story is good.

Keep in mind people originally watching TOS were likely doing so on black and white TVs with a 10"-13" screen ten feet away. The sets looked no worse than Forbidden Planet, a theatrical release from a decade prior.

Modern high definition scans of the original film looks hilariously bad on modern TVs. It looked far less bad on TVs contemporary with the original broadcasts.

Also I was talking about TOS era films which had much more proper sets.

Actually, many people then were getting color TVs. The reason the sets on ST:TOS were so colorful was to attract viewers who had spent a bunch of money for a new color TV set, and wanted to see things in vivid colors.

The modern HD scans of the original film look fantastic. They do, however, show how low-budget the sets were, but the detail of the original film is quite amazing, and these old shows look far better than most stuff produced in the 1990s which was done using videotape.

They use 1960s plastic and foam panels with arrays of giant light bulbs.

That’s an example of bad set design.

The best episode of Star Trek, City on the Edge of Forever, holds up today because of its story and its period sets and costumes, not its sci-fi stuff.

on that - i was flabbergasted at how dated LOTR looked...couldnt believe it!

If the plot is good, then dated effects don't matter. Both the 1916 and 1954 versions of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea hold up today.

I guess some people just can't cope with anything but the most cutting edge effects. If they notice something is fake the movie experience is ruined for them or something. I'm glad I'm not afflicted with this.

It’s not a problem as long as the experience is consistent. If you have an otherwise beautiful movie that suddenly comes out with a terrible effect they would have been better off without it.

Eh, that can be good still. Terminator 1 has the shitty stop motion fully metal terminator at the end, but if you consider the impact that the poor technology had on the movie as a whole, they were essentially forced to leave it to the end because of the low quality. It was a good creative constraint, which served to draw out the tension by only progressively revealing the true nature of the thing, which also concealed how it might be beaten. It also didn’t matter too much because the audience already understood how scary it was by the time the effect came on, so we were able to suspend disbelief easily, and if you watch the movie start to finish for the first time today, it’d be the same. The pacing ended up being incredibly good. Would they have hit that with better effects? Still possible, less likely.

I totally, 100% agree. Gattaca is amazing, and my all time favorite Blade Runner also has outstanding practical effects (flawed, sure, but you stop noticing soon enough).

One of my favorites that, while very cool in general, suffers from some dodgy effects is Aliens. In general I wouldn't change a bit from it, but some of the dropship scenes are terrible and were pretty bad even back then.

Then again, be careful what you (um, I) wish for: if they were to touch up Aliens they wouldn't stop at the dropship and they would ruin it with unnecessary CGI.

I noticed those dropship scenes on a rewatch a couple of years ago. I think when I watched it as a kid it was on a CRT on cable television and you couldn't see the details as much. Plus, I was a kid.

On that note, I just rewatched the original Alien and there's really only one or two shots that looks kind of bad or goofy. Holds up so well for a film from 1979 with what would be a lower range budget in today's money ($44M).

Yes, and also: imagine Alien in the hands of a director with access to today's budget and CGI: it would completely ditch any ambience, pace and characterizations in favor of showing one -- nay, thousands -- of monsters and chase scenes.

This is exactly why I hated the last half of Will Smith’s I Am Legend. The first half did so well at showing a post apocalypse, and the last half ruined everything with CGI video game monsters. They also butchered the main plot.

Well you don't need to look far, that's one of the problems with films from the exact same director such as Alien: Covenant.

Agreed. I did learn my lesson after the awful Prometheus and haven't watched any of the rest though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVLBLJOCBg8 dropship descent and crash are really bad green/blue screen jobs. Writing could also use some work

"Ripley, you've blown the transaxle! You're just grinding metal!"

what transaxle? M577 APC would have to have 4 independent hub motors, or else be a Tardis :) Besides who cares if you blew a motor if the thing still moves, and why abandon mobile safe house other than to segue into terrible dropship scene ;-)

To be fair, even if they had consulted mechanical and automotive engineers in 1985, I'm not sure those engineers would have had enough foresight to predict this. But then again, I think extremely large construction equipment has used hybrid-electric/diesel drives with independent wheel motors for a long time.

Its a case of "your holding it wrong". These movies (blade runner/etc) should come with screen calibrations to assure that people don't have the brightness on their TV's turned up too high. A problem that is far to prevalent, along with having the contrast set at cartoon levels to make them pop.

These old movies were _DARK_. For long stretches you could barely see anything much less all the details of the ships. I read/watched an interview with H.R. Giger many years ago, where he talks about how he created fear in his movies by barely showing anything and letting the mind fill in the horrible details.

So, if you can see the details of the drop ship beyond what is being directly lit by the landing lights/etc then your TV needs to be seriously adjusted. Same for the alien itself, it should only barely be visible. And for a movie like Alien this makes sense, between being in the depths of space, or below heavy/dark cloud cover there shouldn't be a lot of light, particularly ambient light.

I am curious about this H.R. Giger interview. I am unaware of him making any movies though your wording could just be confusing. Did you mean 'created fear in the the elements of the movies he contributed to' or did you really mean 'created fear in his movies'?

He was part of the special effects team for Alien.

I'm not sure where/what interview it was, may have been some commentary on the movie I remember it from many years ago.. But i'm 99% sure the interview was about the special effects in Alien, and how he intentionally kept the alien mostly hidden. Google yields a lot of results but I'm not going to watch all of them for you :)

Anyway, I so I guess he "contributed" the fear since he wasn't the director.

Agreed in general but do note the dropship scene is not particularly dark. The dropship is going through the clouds and the "superimposed" image is pretty bad. I'm pretty sure Cameron cringes nowadays when he looks at it.

Do note most of the other Aliens SFX stood the test of time very well, and of course, it's a Well made movie with awesome pacing, making it easy to forgive those few effects that aren't very good.

Yah I re-watched it after posting that comment, and I think i conflated it with the landing in the original.

But even so, with the brightness on my 10" tablet turned down most of the way it didn't look too bad, some of the dialog though.. guess i've outgrown that kind of stuff.. lol.

> These movies (blade runner/etc) should come with screen calibrations to assure that people don't have the brightness on their TV's turned up too high. A problem that is far to prevalent, along with having the contrast set at cartoon levels to make them pop.

You don't need a hardware calibrator for controlling brightness. Just enable Filmmaker mode and disable everything else like "dynamic contrast", all kinds of motion interpolation, etc.

I was thinking more like those "alpha channel" screen calibrators that lots of games had. Adjust the contrast until the top bar looks to be the same brightness as the bottom bar, then you get another screen where you adjust the brightness until a gray bar is just barely visible.

But yah film modes help with this as long as all the fancy stuff can be disabled. OTOH, I actually like having some basic motion/frame interpolation enabled, because 24FPS drives me almost as crazy as bad 3:2 pull down encoded (or not encoded) streams where slow motion pans/etc are jerky. I guess some of these TV's have a black frame insertion mode (or its part of the film mode) where it drops black frames between 24 FPS content and that helps too.

>Then again, be careful what you (um, I) wish for: if they were to touch up Aliens they wouldn't stop at the dropship and they would ruin it with unnecessary CGI.

I don't think this is fair. Not every director is George Lucas or wants to be like him.

True. George Lucas is the worst offender.

Though Cameron hasn't shown a lot of restraint lately, and Ridley Scott has turned into the biggest cinematic disappointment in my life!

Scott has shown that he's only as good as the script he's given. Give him a great script, you get a great movie. Give him a shitty script, you get a beautiful movie with a shitty plot. He seems to have no ability to judge script quality.

> a minimalist future environment that still looks beautiful 25 years later.

https://franklloydwright.org/site/marin-county-civic-center/

https://secretsanfrancisco.com/marin-county-civic-center-san...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marin_County_Civic_Center

Hey don't forget the CLA building at Cal Poly Pomona[0]!

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLA_Building

If you're ever in the area, I highly recommend just going in and walking around. It's incredible.

I always enjoyed pretending I was Jude Law's character when I got summoned to jury duty there

I was watching an Industrial Light And Magic documentary on Disney+ and it had Spielberg talking about the transition to digital, and he goes out of his way to make the point that effects are great but if you're not presenting it right and telling a story that is worthwhile the film just won't last.

Last time I watch Terminator 2, I stopped frame by frame during the mall shooting scene, and I realized how cheap some effects were, but how editing made it subtly perfect. It just conveys the blow to represent the T1000 liquid metal visually. No need to do more.

I think today's era is obese.. too much power, too available .. no constraint.. the movie gets lost in the technology.

I believe there is one shot in the final steelworks where Arnie is wrestling with a guy wrapped in tinfoil. But it's quick, not obvious and you just accept it as part of "metal dude killing people". It's only in freeze frame that you go - oh yeah.

I know exactly which scene you’re talking about and I haven’t seen that movie in decades. I thought the point was to subvert audience expectations though. Cameron would have the first real SFX on screen be practical so that you think you’re going to see something fairly run-of-the-mill. Then, the shrapnel shrinks digitally and you realize T2 is like nothing you’ve seen.

Well even the first bullet impacts were suspiciously strange but yeah you don't fully get slapped until the body regenerate.

I really wonder how these people (movies, tv or music) felt about things and what emotions made them operate / edit / select shots and tricks to use.

In the ILM documentary, they talked about T2, and how they could do some amazing new effects, but they could not do a large volume of them due to the complexity. They were very careful about how they used their resources.

They had a surprisingly short amount of high end effects time in that film…but it doesn’t feel like it. Th film moves very fluidly and the effects blend from one to another without being jarring.

Too bad he didn't follow his own advice when doing A.I.

Maybe he learned that lesson with AI.

Jurassic Park, full of dinosaurs(!) had less CGI than most mundane action movies of today.

> A lot of great sci-fi is marred by cheap effects that look incredibly dated only a decade later.

I, for one, enjoy low-budget scifi very much. Crappy CGI has it's charm but CGI aside, I have the feeling that actors in lower-budget shows were more involved than those in shows written to be ratings winners.

It's kind of like with websites created with passion and websites created for SEO.

A lower-budget production, particularly by an independent studio, will also have far less interference from "producers" who try to justify their salary by giving notes.

Gattaca is from '97, which was right in the middle of a golden era for movies. Independent films took off and even big studios were affected by the shift.

With regards to GP's comment about bad effects, look at the cult classic Event Horizon from the same year. It still holds up in a lot of ways, but there's one laughably bad element: horrible CGI water droplet effects. It was a hot new effect and they shoved it into way too many shots.

You don't know how good you have it until you see really bad stuff.

Take the animated TV series Space Angel ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Angel ), which evidently used the patented-at-the-time Syncro-Vox ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchro-Vox ) to display moving lips on the animated characters.

It makes Hanna-Barbera cartoons look like Disney-quality works in comparison. The lips made me cringe back when I was a kid watching reruns of the show.

YouTube has episodes of the show.

If you haven't seen it yet: Primer.

Great movie, needs a re-watch or three...

Yes, no kidding on that front, the first time you see it is likely going to leave you with more questions than answers.

I haven't. Not available on Prime Video in my location nor on Blu-Ray but I'll try to find it elsewhere. Thanks.

Particularly when the supposedly futurist technology has already become obsolete since (CRT screens, rudimentary 3d animations, lack of portable communication, absence of networks, etc).

Also lots of sci-fi movies underestimate how much will not change, we live today with 200yo buildings, our cities won't look that different in 200 years.

Not until improved concrete replaces current reinforced concrete: https://theconversation.com/the-problem-with-reinforced-conc...

Well, I live in Copenhagen, in a brick building that is some 130 years old, like most of the buildings around here. Reinforced concrete has arrived, and most new buildings are built with it. I guess when the next level of super-concrete comes, we will start building with it, but old buildings will still stand for 50-100 years.

> Also lots of sci-fi movies underestimate how much will not change

My favorite detail of the Battlestar Galactica reboot was how normal it all felt. For the most part your only clue that it’s The Future was that every rectangle had chopped off corners to become an octagon.

They even found a clever plot-driven reason for why that’s the case. Loved it.

It also wasn’t set on Earth. It was the future of the 12 colonies.

BSG wasn't in the future, it was in the distant past. The people there were the distant ancestors of modern humans (in combination with humans who evolved here on Earth separately from the colonists, and were magically genetically compatible, apparently due to likely divine intervention according to the characters).

So some technologies were more advanced than ours, but other technologies were very much not (such as cassette recorders, radio, etc.).

Yeah that ending always felt flabby to me. 4 seasons of futuristic space-faring humans with FTL jumps fighting a war with super advanced AI cyborgs … psyche, joke’s on you viewer, this is actually 100,000+ years ago. Worst part of the whole show

I don't see how it could have been handled any other way, given the mythology of the show (that there was a 13th lost colony called "Earth", that everyone had heard of).

Your point can be extended to other sci-fi movies that rely on practical effects and sober aesthetics, 2001 comes to mind.

And Blade Runner. The original settings/artwork are miles ahead the 2049 sequel just for this reason.

I instantly loved this film the moment I saw vintage cars with futuristic engine sounds. Simple genius.

Compared this to an example such as Total Recall, where cars were designed to look futuristic. Looked great when the film was released, but terribly dated now. It affects the re-watchability for me.

that's because props >> vfx

props cost much more, so you have to focus on everything else, because you cannot rely on tons of CGI to fill the gaps

jaws is still a terrifying movie about a killer fish, meg is already a joke.

with the Marin County Convention Center to boot!

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