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Comment by bobsmooth | Hacker News Reader

"Marvel allowed the back half of Multiverse of Madness to showcase far more of Raimi’s hallmark directing style, but by then it was too late for the entire film to play out as a cohesive whole. It still grossed nearly a billion dollars worldwide."

Why change when it's working so well?

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Just watched the 3D Blu-ray this evening and the introductory sequence was indeed of appallingly bad CGI quality ("Windows 98 screensaver" indeed), as was the bus-wrecking beast which came off like a rejected design from Monsters Inc., and really the entire first act as a whole was just really rickety. In that sense the poor CGI was the symptom of a more systemic disease. Fortunately Earth-838 has lots of welcome character surprises and the ending redeemed a lot. Not Raimi's best, but hardly his worst.

3D has been garbage since it's inception in cinema though: the guy who pushed it on us (James Cameron) couldn't even constrain himself to the rules of the new tech in the movie which was meant to showcase it (I.e focus pulling will hurt the eyes of the viewer, you have to essentially construct the whole scene in focus so the viewer can look around it).

No one else has really cared about it since then.

It wasn't the 3D that was the problem, though, even though the 3D was obviously not native and the digital mattes were fairly flat. It just wasn't good visuals even in 2D.

That said, Dredd 3D was a high mark in 3D because it was almost all native, especially the component effects photography (the Slo-Mo scenes in particular blew me away). The few upconverted shots stick out like sore thumbs. Upconversion can be done well - see T2 3D, which was mesmerizing - but nowadays 3D conversion is now just another VFX workflow with the same drawbacks.

It's just grain for the pigs.

It might gross 2 billion if it was done better.

I definitely wouldn't say no to a "fully Raimi" movie, but I quite liked the way it started off as typical Marvel cheese and pulled off a surprising change of tack somewhere in the middle. In fact that might be my favourite aspect of the movie.

Multiverse of Madness has to be one of my favourite marvel films of late, I get that the author doesn't like it but saying that it's not a "cohesive whole" is just not true.

Read the comment from the VFX artists that worked on it. The whole article is well researched.

I would if it wasn't paywalled.

> Perhaps the apex of this creative fatigue was Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which underwent extensive reshoots but didn’t have enough of an effects budget to cover that new footage adequately. As a result, the effects in the opening sequence of the film are about as convincing as a Windows 98 screensaver. One supervisor expressed to Defector their exasperation not only with the process on that film, but with the startlingly inert creative choices that went into it.

> “When you see something like the first third of Doctor Strange, you’re like, Why not do something more interesting, where you’re not straining your budget and 1,000 artists to try and make something that you know is going to look substandard? Why not try something else when you have a good director like Sam Raimi?“

... followed by the original paragraph.

There's no big shocking revelation that backs up the "not a cohesive whole" point imo.

I think it's hard to accurately judge something you have worked on.

I'm a video game developer and I struggle to enjoy the games I work on - all I can see is the bugs and the areas we didn't deliver or where we changed the artistic vision or where yes, we had to re-do certain systems a hundred times. And yet, people seem to enjoy them. They review well. So maybe my opinion as a developer isn't really worth that much.

I feel the same about the opinion you copied here - having watched Multiverse of Madness 3 times now I don't see any issue with the opening sequence. It looks pretty good from visual standpoint in fact. But I'm sure a trained VFX artist can point out the areas where it fell short and how many times they had to change it. The only visual effect in this entire film that stood out to me as "bad" was the sequence with illuminati right after they killed their thanos - that just looks like a poor Photoshop.

> Multiverse of Madness has to be one of my favourite marvel films of late

I’m curious why you think that. I thought it was one of the most boring Marvel films in the franchise, and I’m surprised I was able to stay awake for the entire thing. On the other hand, its twin, "Everything Everywhere All at Once", had me deeply engrossed and interested.

It was crazy and out there, like the comics are - which is what I love in Marvel. The scene where Dr Strange commands the dead in another universe is like absolute peak enjoyment for me. The worst marvel film for me is Civil War since it's so.....grounded(closely followed by Ragnarok, but that's purely because I can't stand Waititi's humour)

I've watched it 3 times now and I still love it - it's their best film since Infinity War, everything else after that was very much meh.

I felt completely left out, because although I had seen the last Spiderman movie, I hadn't watched Wandavision or half of the TV shows. It was like trying to follow a game in a sport you only have a casual interest in: you kind of know the rules but have no idea who the main teams or players are or who is up or down in the league, so your enjoyment is limited to the occasional good goal or pass (or VFX shot in this case).

In contrast to DC movies - very hit and miss in quality, but you can at least watch a movie without having to follow a dozen other TV shows and other films in the franchise.

So I personally enjoy this style of storytelling - it rewards you for knowing the backstory of all the characters, it allows for a richer universe, and you don't feel like the film treats you like an idiot for explaining everything you might already know.

But - I can also see why this is a problem - you're right that people who haven't seen Wandavision would be very confused by this film. Wanda went from being a hero in Infinity War/Endgame, to suddenly being a villain.

mind you that you still can't legally watch WV in a lot of the countries the movie is running in.

I know, and I agree it's a problem. I don't know what the right answer is. I think building a big universe requires some background knowledge of the events and characters, but maybe in this specific case Wanda could have used like one more scene just to explain what happened in Westview.

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