10 ms·

The movie mistake mystery from "Revenge of the Sith"

456 points by CharlesW 2y ago

the_af 2y ago
I have to agree with the article's author that what he calls "overzealous" removal of movie mistakes seems wrong. It wouldn't matter so much if the original movie was still readily available, but it's often the case that only the latest "fixed" version remains available. With Star Wars in particular, Lucas' incessant meddling has long have gone far past the point of diminishing returns, and frequently making the movies worse. More in general, I like watching the original movie, warts and all. I often disagree with the corrections, especially when they restore scenes that were left out for a reason, make color correction choices I disagree with (e.g. Blade Runner's "green tint" is inferior to its original bluish tint), etc.
- pnw 2y ago
  Agree 100%. In addition to fixing mistakes and changing the color palette, I also object to the use of DNR and similar techniques to remove the film grain from older movies, in order to make them look more "modern", like films shot on digital. Unfortunately Cameron's recent 4k remasters of his classic films all suffer from this problem.
  - hammock 2y ago
    I get it though, it’s crazy that I know so many people who now say “I don’t like old movies” or “I don’t want to watch this movie, it looks old” when what they see and are really saying without realizing it is , it was shot on film. It’s especially worse since the hit rate of actually good, creative movies is so much lower in the digital era. My big pet peeve now is these “ew, this movie looks old” attitude. I was watching Sum of All Fears the other day and my partner had this attitude. Funny though as soon as people in tuxedos showed up on the screen she changed her mind and started watching. Tuxedos are one of those movie magic things.
    - jimbokun 2y ago
      Weird how what we grow up with influences our tastes. To me the look of films shot on old school film signals “high quality” and overly digitally edited movies signals “cheap” in the sense of being shot on a green screen lot to save on shooting on location.
      - alabastervlog 2y ago
        I think people who start to get into the craft of film-making (even academically, not making their own films) even a little tend to open up a lot to older films. It’s so much more impressive when they had to actually arrange for the thing you’re seeing to exist, at least in some sense, in real life, so light could bounce off it and hit the film. That is a real landscape that the actors and crew had to travel to! They really made horses jump off that train car! They really had two thousand extras for this shot! That kind of thing. If there was a set at least they had to build it, and even if the results look a little janky it’s usually interesting and the craft impressive. They shot with environmental lighting? They had to rig their other lights just so and maybe just work with what was available to get a good shot. The light is the light. The constraints on their options often seem to improve, rather than harm, the final product. Now it’s like oh they couldn’t even be bothered to film on a real damn street. Ugh. All the location shooting is just getting backgrounds to composite in later. The light on the actors didn’t even exist when and where the background was shot. It sucks and is boring.
        hammock 2y ago
        Learning how to light my home office/ zoom background really made me pay 10000x more attention to lighting design in movies.
      - hammock 2y ago
        I agree with you. I can't stand any of these modern superhero movies because they are all hyper digital / green screen. For all I know they might have amazing acting and storylines etc, but I'll never know because they are basically unwatchable to me.
  - neckro23 2y ago
    It's a travesty. I was sourcing video for an Alien/Aliens watch party (for a couple of adolescents who had never seen either) and I had to hunt down a copy of the older HD Bluray of Aliens because the 4k remaster looked so awful. (By contrast, the 4k of Alien looks fantastic.)
- phreack 2y ago
  This is why archiving is such a worthwhile endeavor. We could end up losing the original movies otherwise!
- jimbokun 2y ago
  It’s the artistic equivalent of Stalin erasing disfavored figures from Soviet photographs.
615341652341 2y ago
Finally! I’ve only been casually following this over the years, so this is a great write up!!
vmilner 2y ago
I noticed watching the recent 4K release of The Terminator that the garage attendant in the final scene has a piece of paper in his top pocket with "There's a storm coming“ written upside down on it.
- xhevahir 2y ago
  Did you notice the Terminator counts his kills in floating-point numbers? I'd hate to see the studio correct these things.
  - p_ing 2y ago
    "Casualties", not kills. Perhaps using floating point is for working with another Terminator, or the decimal value being calculated based on the wound inflicted, with a whole number being a kill. Or really, just to Look Cool And Technical And Shit.
    - kibwen 2y ago
      To nobody's surprise, Skynet is a strict utilitarian who has rationally concluded that plucking one billion eyelashes is equivalent to one murder.
      - p_ing 2y ago
        There's a lot of camera-eye real estate for zeros!
  - varjag 2y ago
    So T800 is indeed coded in Javascript, I knew it! What else to expect of devs in 2029
    - jimbokun 2y ago
      It’s because JavaScript has the most example code in the LLM’s training data that writes the Terminator source code.
p_ing 2y ago
> Painting out these movie mistakes as part of a restoration is wrong. What's in the movie is in the movie, and altering the movie to this extent is a form of revisionist history. How many times has Lord of the Rings been revised? Dune? <Insert other long-lived actively managed novel>. Is the active management of these novels "wrong"? Is fixing grammar, spelling, or clarifying story beats "wrong"? I personally don't think so, and I'd rather read something which has been corrected, especially if done for story clarity.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  George Lucas had an especially hostile stand against the unaltered versions though.
- jimbokun 2y ago
  All of those are absolutely wrong. In the vast majority of cases it’s “fixing” the original in this sense; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/18/painting-matching-fresco-monkey-christ-resurfaces-zaragoza-spain https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/18/painting-match... Also, it’s important to be able to see these works as originally published. Otherwise, you are passing off a forgery as the original.
  - alabastervlog 2y ago
    I’m not necessarily opposed to all fixes like this, but in film most of these strike me as totally unnecessary and making the movie strictly worse. Normal viewers almost never notice these things, and movie nerds like little glimpses behind the curtain. So it’s doing almost nothing for one sort of viewer, and making it worse for another.
  - p_ing 2y ago
    How are they wrong? Which ones are wrong? Which spelling correction, grammar correction, story clarity is wrong? Is the Blade Runner Director's Cut wrong?
    - the_af 2y ago
_wire_ 2y ago
The only one I've ever noticed on my own in a long life of watching movies is the compressed air tank to overturn a chariot in Gladiator (2000). I was told about the pole that causes the truck to flip in Raiders of the Lost Ark and now I can't unsee it. —Warning to those who enjoy 2001 A Space Odyssey with their blinders on...— 2001 made a big impression on me as a kid and I've seen it many times. There was a point when watching for the Nth time in middle age that I first noticed that all the anti-gravity shots show the actors bodies carrying their own weight. Especially in the aisle scene with the floating pen, which itself is rotating about the center of the sheet of clear plastic it's attached to rather than its center of mass. Later in the same sequence, food trays are brought to the bridge after the long scenes of a flight attendant, who picks up trays as they slide downs from a dispenser, and as she hands the trays to the crew, one of them instinctively puts his hand out under the tray to helpfully catch its weight. In the next scene an officer joins other crew by coming up from behind them, leaning over and resting his arms on their chair backs as the scene cuts to details of anti-gravity meal consumption. Finally Floyd stands in front of a toilet reading a 1000 word hard-printed list of instructions after the viewer has been shown electronic displays used everywhere else. The self-consciousness of that clip provides a lovely relief from all the previous cognitive dissonance. I'm not able to unsee any of this now and it detracts from the spectacle. But at the same time, it makes the orchestration and ideas of the movie seem all the more artistic, so nothing lost except innocence. There are many other oddities to find in the movie working on different planes of awareness, including proprioceptive assumptions about reality, intelligence, progress, and spirituality.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  I too have seen 2001 countless times, and I missed some of these! One you missed is when food is sucked from the tube, the food flows back down into the container. We had very little experience with zero g at the time, and surely Kubrick and his crew had zero. They did a remarkable job despite that.
  - _wire_ 2y ago
    Ah good call! I noticed that too, but didn't mention it because I want to believe the packaging would be designed tend to keep the food in... But yes, this too because the packages wouldn't use an open-ended straw? At the time of that movie, my world didn't contain much of the materials and designs portrayed, so the whole production was mesmerizing with design elements that distracted from more practical details: like ZOMG what kind of plastic is that tray made out of? Look how spacey that furniture is! The video phone Floyd uses seems ridiculous with its $5 charge for a call. But pay phones worked on dimes. On his call to his daughter, she is seen next to a totem with a touchtone keypad for dialing. ATT advertised that as a concept product at that time, and touchtone phones were still novel (as were Tang and ballpoint pens that could write upside down). When LED pocket calculators arrived in early 70s the color red of those LEDs was unlike anything else you would see; it seemed amazing. And at the time real tech design was often awkward and cheesy, especial goofy arrangements of car interiors, which smelled funny and had plastic that fell apart after a few years of exposure to the sunlight and heat. In 60s it was typical for TV remotes to have just a button for channel change and that's all. And the channel change worked by an electric motor rotating the channel dial. A big feature was a second button to change down instead of up, In the 70s when cable TV arrived the converter box added remote functions to old TVs, which was a big part of the appeal, and in 1981 MTV was in stereo if you hooked up the cable to your hi-fi FM receiver and tuned the simulcast station. You could write to MTV and there'd send you a sticker for your tuner. So the sets in 2001 seemed like astounding fashion design for many people, and that was still so when Star Wars arrived in '77.
alganet 2y ago
Toasty!
- alganet 2y ago
  For those that didn't catch it, "toasty!" makes reference to Ed Boon, a video game programmer. He appears as an Easter Egg in several incarnations of the Mortal Kombat series as a head on the side of the screen that says "toasty" in a falsetto voice, particularly when the player applies a perfect uppercut move. Mortal Kombat also shares the same initials with MK Ultra, a controversial (real or maybe not, successful or maybe not) psyops program supposedly developed by the USA. Similarly, "Star Wars" also alludes to a controversial USA space program that fluked. I never noticed the head behind Anakin, but I am assuming it is really there. Thus, the whole thing has striking similarity to that VFX fluke in many angles, making it a great coincidence.
crazygringo 2y ago
> Painting out these movie mistakes as part of a restoration is wrong. What's in the movie is in the movie, and altering the movie to this extent is a form of revisionist history. Cinema is worse off when over-aggressive restorations alter the action within the frame. To me, this is equivalent to swapping out an actor's performance with a different take, or changing the music score during an action sequence, or replacing a puppet creature with a computer graphics version of the same creature decades after release. It's really not the equivalent though. I don't see anything wrong with fixing a license plate or removing a reflection or a modern-day wristwatch. It's the equivalent of fixing a spelling error in a novel, or a wrong chord in sheet music. None of the filmmakers wanted those things there. They weren't done with intent. They were just mistakes. Changing music or replacing a puppet with CG, of course I'm against. That's changing the art of it. Different music makes you feel different. A CG creature has a different personality. Just like you don't want to replace vocabulary in a novel to make it more modern-day. I think it's usually pretty easy to distinguish the two. The first ones would have been corrected at the time if they'd noticed and gone for another take. They take us out of the movie if we notice them. The latter category is a reflection of the technology, resources, and intentional choices. They keep us in the world of moviemaking as it was at that time.
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  I’m a lot more bothered by the change to the color grading in the “after” of Alien than the minor change to the effect, and by the picture looking way shittier in the “fixed” Goodfellas shot (the first is blu ray, the second “blu ray and streaming”, so hopefully the example was taken from streaming and that’s why it looks so much worse)
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    Oh yeah. Totally agreed on not changing the color grading. That's as big as changing the music. With blogs that take screenshots of 4K content though, sometimes that's using a media player with poor HDR color decoding though. Bad HDR always winds up with a green tint, that's the telltale sign. VLC is the worst with that. But I don't think that's the case here. There are definitely a lot of rereleases with badly done color.
jonathanlydall 2y ago
I watched Aliens at least half a dozen times (still one of my all time favourites), and only noticed it when a friend pointed it out to us as it was playing at New Year’s party.
haunter 2y ago
I hate editing mistakes more. The Aviator has quite a few of these where for example in cut A two characters talk by walking side by side, in cut B they stop and turn towards each other (still talking), and in cut C they continue the talking but you can see cut A and C are the continuation of each other and cut B was inserted in the middle https://files.catbox.moe/dljiiw.mp4 https://files.catbox.moe/dljiiw.mp4 And that's just one example that film is full of those. Here is another jarring one https://files.catbox.moe/9m3gjq.mp4 https://files.catbox.moe/9m3gjq.mp4 Despite that it won the Academy Award for Best Editing...
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  I’ve managed to make myself so sensitive to this that I get all tense when there’s a multi-camera setup for a conversation, waiting for the moment when they cut from A to B and someone’s hands or head have teleported to a slightly (and sometimes not slightly!) different position. Very few such sequences complete without my noticing some spot where shots don’t match up. Another one is key lights reflected in eyeballs. Nearly ruins Jackson’s LOTR trilogy for me, it’s in basically every damn scene. In several shots you can practically diagram out their whole lighting rig from a the reflections on an actor’s eye, so many lights are plainly and distinctly visible. You see it some in lots of movies but OMG it’s bad in those.
  - andrewinardeer 2y ago
    I have always considered it an actors job to ensure their hands or cigarette or whatever are in the same position when they hit the same word during multiple takes.
    - crazygringo 2y ago
      It's never going to be perfect or identical. Actors' #1 job is to give an emotionally believable, powerful performance. A thousand little details are different in every take, and your movements will change to reflect what is authentic in the moment. In fact, editors want emotional variety so that they have more options in assembling the scene. Yes, things are blocked ahead of time. You'll stand up at the same moment, you'll stop walking at a particular mark. But there are limits, especially with things like hands and cigarettes. If you look for continuity errors around those, you'll find them everywhere. Actors, directors and editors have more important things to worry about.
sickcodebruh 2y ago
There’s a really funny duality to mistakes in recorded art that is vastly different when viewed as a fan and the creator. As a music fan, I really love little mistakes in incredible albums. They’re humanizing, they show that the recording was made by people and it makes the highs feel so much higher. As an artist, I loathe mistakes in my own work and I will spend a basically limitless amount of time fixing annoying performance quirks in software — I’m talking things that I can do but didn’t get quite right — so I can listen to it without distraction or regrets. I know that nobody will notice these except me and the type of listener who does catch them will either not mind or appreciate it the way I would. But when it’s my own work, it’s different. I’m sure it’s the same for filmmakers so I understand the impulse to fix it later.
- DangitBobby 2y ago
  I'm sure if artists didn't obsess over the work like you do, it wouldn't be nearly as fun to find them as a fan.
- djaychela 2y ago
  >As a music fan, I really love little mistakes in incredible albums. Me too. For me as a Genesis fan since I was a teenager, the worst example of a change has been the 'remastered' version of Supper's ready. There's a 'mistake' in the bass part right at the end, which to me is absolutely beautiful. It's about 22:46 in, right at the fade, and he plays the wrong bass note, a tone (I think) above what should be there, and then resolves down to the root note of the chord. Always loved this, it sounds lyrical and works really well. And in the remastered version, it's not there, he goes straight to the root note. And for me, it ruins 20+ minutes of buildup. I never listen to the remastered version and I'm glad I ripped my CDs back in the day so I have a record of the original (and for me, far better) bass part. Yes, it's only one note, but it's a great note!
codeflo 2y ago
Looking at the green screen shots of that Mustafar fight in Episode III: If that was the actual lighting of the in-camera scene, then it's not a mystery at all that everything in that movie looked so fake.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  I want to believe they've improved the process by a lot since then, including getting the lighting right. Although I'm sure most of that is done in post-processing. The making of The Mandalorian is interesting though, by using a projected screen as the set rendered in realtime, they can get the environmental lighting on the actors correct as well without much post-processing.
  - joshvm 2y ago
    The Volume is pretty cool. A practical version of this that's often overlooked is Oblivion (probably because the plot is naff). The "sky tower" set is physical with 270 degrees of front projection to handle the sky. It would have been a lot harder to convincingly re-create all the optical effects and not worry about what light would look like scattered off glass or other occluding objects. https://www.fdtimes.com/2013/03/29/claudio-miranda-asc-on-oblivion/ https://www.fdtimes.com/2013/03/29/claudio-miranda-asc-on-ob... Another example is the motion simulator/projector setup from First Man, which makes the cockpit and landing sequences look so good. They won best VFX. https://youtu.be/sw57ORTgGG4?si=NjRNt551HJhL_l9k&t=193 https://youtu.be/sw57ORTgGG4?si=NjRNt551HJhL_l9k&t=193 (relevant footage starts around 3:13) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UChwuyWVzsI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UChwuyWVzsI
  - DidYaWipe 2y ago
    Yes, but using LED walls like that has a drawback: The scene is baked in. Although it generally looks better than greenscreen, you can't change it afterward.
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  By Episode II, Lucas had decided to make damn near everything green screen. They weren’t even building chairs and benches the actors sat on. Green boxes in many cases. It looked like complete shit even by the standards of the time, and of course hasn’t aged well. I watched a “film edits” fan edit of the Clone Wars CG cartoon, and one of the odder things about the experience was the end, where the editor cut together the final arc of that show, another shorter 2D cartoon, and the live action (well… mostly also just CG) Revenge of the Sith in roughly chronological order (including some nifty simultaneous action bits). What was so odd was how very much worse and less-real-feeling the “live action” film was than the wholly CG cartoon. The writing, the line delivery, the sets, the action, the editing—it was all worse and came off as far more fake than a literal cartoon.
glacier5674 2y ago
[dead]
bombcar 2y ago
Does that Civil War movie have a modern electrical box in the background? Because that's what it looks like to me - totally distracted me from the watch.
pavlov 2y ago
Seeing the original live action footage reminds how challenging these productions must have been for the actors. There's nothing around you but green screen and a stunt rigger. The dialog sucks and you're little more than a puppet in these action sequences, week after week of shoots. Lucas wanted to push the digital envelope, but the contemporary Harry Potter films also by ILM have aged much better because they relied on physical sets and practical effects as much as possible. You can tell the actors are actually within a world.
- 93po 2y ago
  off the top of my head i thought the hp films have tons of digital effects that has aged poorly that could have been pratical and been much better, but after some research there was actually an absolute ton that would now 100% just be CGI these days. i do however thing house elves and centaurs and dementors could have been more practical and possibly been better? hard to say though. like even most full body shots of hagrid was a robot-face version of him
mproud 2y ago
How is this different than say a literary author who was let know of an error after publication and fixed it with a re-release of a book?
_wire_ 2y ago
In the referenced video, there's a clip from the movie Glory where a fair-skinned hand with a digital watch is in the frame. I like to think this must be a glib reference to Blake Edward's' The Party (1968) in which Peter Sellers dresses in dark face to play Hrundi V. Bakshi, who is introduced as a hapless Hollywood extra on the set of an Alamo-style Western. After a cut, the director asks Bakshi what time it is and Bakshi looks at his huge underwater wristwatch to tell him the time, then sheepishly realizes his mistake as the director goes apoplectic.
- _wire_ 2y ago
  My bad re Party reference... From imdb trivia: //The sequence in which Peter Sellers's character plays his bugle to rouse his troops is a satire of Gunga Din (1939).//
nickvec 2y ago
Great writeup, though a bit confusing to first refer to Anakin as Darth Vader when the scene takes place prior to that development in the Star Wars arc.
- kevinventullo 2y ago
  Technically the emperor dubs Anakin as Vader just after the showdown where Anakin betrays Mace Windu. The battle with Obi-Wan happens after that. I’m not normally this pedantic, but on the topic of Star Wars it somehow feels appropriate.
  - nickvec 2y ago
    TIL, honestly have only watched Star Wars once, so I appreciate the correction.
dfxm12 2y ago
I'm sure most people know the story. In the Twin Peaks pilot, a mirror reflection of a set dresser was briefly caught by the camera. Instead of editing this out of reshooting, David Lynch gave him a role in the show. Anyway, movies can have revisions. A movie is as much a commercial product as it is art. I don't see why people need to get all righteous about it, especially in cases where directors, actors, etc., don't care. Novels get revisions. Even fine art prints may have editions with differences between them. Old wood blocks by a famous artist may even be restruck decades later by a different person. They're still recognized as the piece.
- toyg 2y ago
  > David Lynch gave him a role in the show Not just "a" role - he became "the" key role in the series, the evil spirit that moves the entire plot. Which was both absolute genius (turning a mistake into the first, menacing appearance of a key character) and absolute madness (how do you hand a key character of your expensive production to a random set-dresser with almost no acting career?!?). David Lynch in a nutshell.
  - defrost 2y ago
    Would that be worse than hiring a set carpenter for a key role in billion dollar franchise? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Ford https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Ford It's Hollywood, every busboy and valet is a role deficit actor in waiting.
    - toyg 2y ago
      Star Wars was definitely not a billion-dollar franchise at that time. Alec McGuinness famously negotiated to earn a percentage of gross revenue, because the salary offered was a pittance and he didn't expect any profits to ever be generated by such a bad production. And Ford had already worked as an actor in American Graffiti.
- thebruce87m 2y ago
  Didn’t know this, more info here: > In the final scene, where Sarah Palmer has an upsetting vision, one can briefly make out the reflection of Set Decorator Frank Silva in the mirror behind her. When this was called to Lynch's attention on the set, he was overjoyed and shouted "PERFECT!" This is how Frank Silva was chosen to play the character of Killer BOB. https://twinpeaks.fandom.com/wiki/Pilot https://twinpeaks.fandom.com/wiki/Pilot
strunz 2y ago
We really couldn't get the name of the person whose face has been accidentally in a movie that's part of one of the great pieces of pop culture on modern history? Was really more interested to know who it was, what exactly he was doing, and what he thinks about it.
- tvaziri 2y ago
  we tried VERY hard - couldn't find him
gorfian_robot 2y ago
some folks here might be interested in the Despecialized Editions of the Star Wars films https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmy%27s_Despecialized_Edition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmy%27s_Despecialized_Editio...
Pikamander2 2y ago
Another infamous example is that they accidentally left a Starbucks cup on the table in the final season of Game Of Thrones: https://i.imgur.com/5tlRhti.png https://i.imgur.com/5tlRhti.png Taking into account the already-negative reception of the final season, it became symbolic of the show's decline in quality. The cup was edited out in later releases. Family Guy also did a quick cutaway gag of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGIpZk4SKTI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGIpZk4SKTI
Trixter 2y ago
> Painting out these movie mistakes as part of a restoration is wrong. As part of a restoration, yes. As part of a remaster, no. If the remaster is overseen by the primary creative (such as everything done to the Aliens UHD 4k release, which was overseen and approved by Cameron), then it's official -- and as an audience member, you have to examine how you feel about that. For example, some enthusiasts lament the removal of film grain in Aliens, but Cameron has said in interviews that he hated the grain in Aliens because he was forced to use a particular film stock and didn't like the result. So it was never the director's vision to have excessive grain in that movie, and the audience should accept the 4k UHD release as canonical and authorized. These debates are colored (no pun intended) by nostalgia, much like the vinyl vs. digital debates.
- the_af 2y ago
  Movies don't belong exclusively to their authors. They belong to audiences as well, if not more. If I hate the color grading of a remaster, and this becomes the only version readily available, I don't care whether the original author oversaw the process -- it's a net negative. And this garbage with color grading happens often :(
clemiclemen 2y ago
A bit late to the party but there is a famous French internet show called "Faux-raccord" which does exactly what this article does: every episode is focused on mistakes for some movie, told by the duo Michel and Michel with some jokes along the way. Very pleasant to watch :-) Link: https://www.allocine.fr/video/programme-12284/ https://www.allocine.fr/video/programme-12284/ Youtube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTbUDA_Dd9s&list=PLAUaCoiUsxl5dhnCco7joRMFs1ydrqbXN https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTbUDA_Dd9s&list=PLAUaCoiUsx...

456 points by CharlesW 2y ago

I have to agree with the article's author that what he calls "overzealous" removal of movie mistakes seems wrong. It wouldn't matter so much if the original movie was still readily available, but it's often the case that only the latest "fixed" version remains available. With Star Wars in particular, Lucas' incessant meddling has long have gone far past the point of diminishing returns, and frequently making the movies worse. More in general, I like watching the original movie, warts and all. I often disagree with the corrections, especially when they restore scenes that were left out for a reason, make color correction choices I disagree with (e.g. Blade Runner's "green tint" is inferior to its original bluish tint), etc.

pnw 2y ago
Agree 100%. In addition to fixing mistakes and changing the color palette, I also object to the use of DNR and similar techniques to remove the film grain from older movies, in order to make them look more "modern", like films shot on digital. Unfortunately Cameron's recent 4k remasters of his classic films all suffer from this problem.
- hammock 2y ago
  I get it though, it’s crazy that I know so many people who now say “I don’t like old movies” or “I don’t want to watch this movie, it looks old” when what they see and are really saying without realizing it is , it was shot on film. It’s especially worse since the hit rate of actually good, creative movies is so much lower in the digital era. My big pet peeve now is these “ew, this movie looks old” attitude. I was watching Sum of All Fears the other day and my partner had this attitude. Funny though as soon as people in tuxedos showed up on the screen she changed her mind and started watching. Tuxedos are one of those movie magic things.
  - jimbokun 2y ago
    Weird how what we grow up with influences our tastes. To me the look of films shot on old school film signals “high quality” and overly digitally edited movies signals “cheap” in the sense of being shot on a green screen lot to save on shooting on location.
    - alabastervlog 2y ago
      I think people who start to get into the craft of film-making (even academically, not making their own films) even a little tend to open up a lot to older films. It’s so much more impressive when they had to actually arrange for the thing you’re seeing to exist, at least in some sense, in real life, so light could bounce off it and hit the film. That is a real landscape that the actors and crew had to travel to! They really made horses jump off that train car! They really had two thousand extras for this shot! That kind of thing. If there was a set at least they had to build it, and even if the results look a little janky it’s usually interesting and the craft impressive. They shot with environmental lighting? They had to rig their other lights just so and maybe just work with what was available to get a good shot. The light is the light. The constraints on their options often seem to improve, rather than harm, the final product. Now it’s like oh they couldn’t even be bothered to film on a real damn street. Ugh. All the location shooting is just getting backgrounds to composite in later. The light on the actors didn’t even exist when and where the background was shot. It sucks and is boring.
      - hammock 2y ago
        Learning how to light my home office/ zoom background really made me pay 10000x more attention to lighting design in movies.
    - hammock 2y ago
      I agree with you. I can't stand any of these modern superhero movies because they are all hyper digital / green screen. For all I know they might have amazing acting and storylines etc, but I'll never know because they are basically unwatchable to me.
- neckro23 2y ago
  It's a travesty. I was sourcing video for an Alien/Aliens watch party (for a couple of adolescents who had never seen either) and I had to hunt down a copy of the older HD Bluray of Aliens because the 4k remaster looked so awful. (By contrast, the 4k of Alien looks fantastic.)
phreack 2y ago
This is why archiving is such a worthwhile endeavor. We could end up losing the original movies otherwise!
jimbokun 2y ago
It’s the artistic equivalent of Stalin erasing disfavored figures from Soviet photographs.

615341652341 2y ago

Finally! I’ve only been casually following this over the years, so this is a great write up!!

vmilner 2y ago

I noticed watching the recent 4K release of The Terminator that the garage attendant in the final scene has a piece of paper in his top pocket with "There's a storm coming“ written upside down on it.

xhevahir 2y ago
Did you notice the Terminator counts his kills in floating-point numbers? I'd hate to see the studio correct these things.
- p_ing 2y ago
  "Casualties", not kills. Perhaps using floating point is for working with another Terminator, or the decimal value being calculated based on the wound inflicted, with a whole number being a kill. Or really, just to Look Cool And Technical And Shit.
  - kibwen 2y ago
    To nobody's surprise, Skynet is a strict utilitarian who has rationally concluded that plucking one billion eyelashes is equivalent to one murder.
    - p_ing 2y ago
      There's a lot of camera-eye real estate for zeros!
- varjag 2y ago
  So T800 is indeed coded in Javascript, I knew it! What else to expect of devs in 2029
  - jimbokun 2y ago
    It’s because JavaScript has the most example code in the LLM’s training data that writes the Terminator source code.

p_ing 2y ago

> Painting out these movie mistakes as part of a restoration is wrong. What's in the movie is in the movie, and altering the movie to this extent is a form of revisionist history. How many times has Lord of the Rings been revised? Dune? <Insert other long-lived actively managed novel>. Is the active management of these novels "wrong"? Is fixing grammar, spelling, or clarifying story beats "wrong"? I personally don't think so, and I'd rather read something which has been corrected, especially if done for story clarity.

rightbyte 2y ago
George Lucas had an especially hostile stand against the unaltered versions though.
jimbokun 2y ago
All of those are absolutely wrong. In the vast majority of cases it’s “fixing” the original in this sense; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/18/painting-matching-fresco-monkey-christ-resurfaces-zaragoza-spain https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/18/painting-match... Also, it’s important to be able to see these works as originally published. Otherwise, you are passing off a forgery as the original.
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  I’m not necessarily opposed to all fixes like this, but in film most of these strike me as totally unnecessary and making the movie strictly worse. Normal viewers almost never notice these things, and movie nerds like little glimpses behind the curtain. So it’s doing almost nothing for one sort of viewer, and making it worse for another.
- p_ing 2y ago
  How are they wrong? Which ones are wrong? Which spelling correction, grammar correction, story clarity is wrong? Is the Blade Runner Director's Cut wrong?
  - the_af 2y ago

_wire_ 2y ago

The only one I've ever noticed on my own in a long life of watching movies is the compressed air tank to overturn a chariot in Gladiator (2000). I was told about the pole that causes the truck to flip in Raiders of the Lost Ark and now I can't unsee it. —Warning to those who enjoy 2001 A Space Odyssey with their blinders on...— 2001 made a big impression on me as a kid and I've seen it many times. There was a point when watching for the Nth time in middle age that I first noticed that all the anti-gravity shots show the actors bodies carrying their own weight. Especially in the aisle scene with the floating pen, which itself is rotating about the center of the sheet of clear plastic it's attached to rather than its center of mass. Later in the same sequence, food trays are brought to the bridge after the long scenes of a flight attendant, who picks up trays as they slide downs from a dispenser, and as she hands the trays to the crew, one of them instinctively puts his hand out under the tray to helpfully catch its weight. In the next scene an officer joins other crew by coming up from behind them, leaning over and resting his arms on their chair backs as the scene cuts to details of anti-gravity meal consumption. Finally Floyd stands in front of a toilet reading a 1000 word hard-printed list of instructions after the viewer has been shown electronic displays used everywhere else. The self-consciousness of that clip provides a lovely relief from all the previous cognitive dissonance. I'm not able to unsee any of this now and it detracts from the spectacle. But at the same time, it makes the orchestration and ideas of the movie seem all the more artistic, so nothing lost except innocence. There are many other oddities to find in the movie working on different planes of awareness, including proprioceptive assumptions about reality, intelligence, progress, and spirituality.

WalterBright 2y ago
I too have seen 2001 countless times, and I missed some of these! One you missed is when food is sucked from the tube, the food flows back down into the container. We had very little experience with zero g at the time, and surely Kubrick and his crew had zero. They did a remarkable job despite that.
- _wire_ 2y ago
  Ah good call! I noticed that too, but didn't mention it because I want to believe the packaging would be designed tend to keep the food in... But yes, this too because the packages wouldn't use an open-ended straw? At the time of that movie, my world didn't contain much of the materials and designs portrayed, so the whole production was mesmerizing with design elements that distracted from more practical details: like ZOMG what kind of plastic is that tray made out of? Look how spacey that furniture is! The video phone Floyd uses seems ridiculous with its $5 charge for a call. But pay phones worked on dimes. On his call to his daughter, she is seen next to a totem with a touchtone keypad for dialing. ATT advertised that as a concept product at that time, and touchtone phones were still novel (as were Tang and ballpoint pens that could write upside down). When LED pocket calculators arrived in early 70s the color red of those LEDs was unlike anything else you would see; it seemed amazing. And at the time real tech design was often awkward and cheesy, especial goofy arrangements of car interiors, which smelled funny and had plastic that fell apart after a few years of exposure to the sunlight and heat. In 60s it was typical for TV remotes to have just a button for channel change and that's all. And the channel change worked by an electric motor rotating the channel dial. A big feature was a second button to change down instead of up, In the 70s when cable TV arrived the converter box added remote functions to old TVs, which was a big part of the appeal, and in 1981 MTV was in stereo if you hooked up the cable to your hi-fi FM receiver and tuned the simulcast station. You could write to MTV and there'd send you a sticker for your tuner. So the sets in 2001 seemed like astounding fashion design for many people, and that was still so when Star Wars arrived in '77.

alganet 2y ago

Toasty!

alganet 2y ago
For those that didn't catch it, "toasty!" makes reference to Ed Boon, a video game programmer. He appears as an Easter Egg in several incarnations of the Mortal Kombat series as a head on the side of the screen that says "toasty" in a falsetto voice, particularly when the player applies a perfect uppercut move. Mortal Kombat also shares the same initials with MK Ultra, a controversial (real or maybe not, successful or maybe not) psyops program supposedly developed by the USA. Similarly, "Star Wars" also alludes to a controversial USA space program that fluked. I never noticed the head behind Anakin, but I am assuming it is really there. Thus, the whole thing has striking similarity to that VFX fluke in many angles, making it a great coincidence.

crazygringo 2y ago

> Painting out these movie mistakes as part of a restoration is wrong. What's in the movie is in the movie, and altering the movie to this extent is a form of revisionist history. Cinema is worse off when over-aggressive restorations alter the action within the frame. To me, this is equivalent to swapping out an actor's performance with a different take, or changing the music score during an action sequence, or replacing a puppet creature with a computer graphics version of the same creature decades after release. It's really not the equivalent though. I don't see anything wrong with fixing a license plate or removing a reflection or a modern-day wristwatch. It's the equivalent of fixing a spelling error in a novel, or a wrong chord in sheet music. None of the filmmakers wanted those things there. They weren't done with intent. They were just mistakes. Changing music or replacing a puppet with CG, of course I'm against. That's changing the art of it. Different music makes you feel different. A CG creature has a different personality. Just like you don't want to replace vocabulary in a novel to make it more modern-day. I think it's usually pretty easy to distinguish the two. The first ones would have been corrected at the time if they'd noticed and gone for another take. They take us out of the movie if we notice them. The latter category is a reflection of the technology, resources, and intentional choices. They keep us in the world of moviemaking as it was at that time.

alabastervlog 2y ago
I’m a lot more bothered by the change to the color grading in the “after” of Alien than the minor change to the effect, and by the picture looking way shittier in the “fixed” Goodfellas shot (the first is blu ray, the second “blu ray and streaming”, so hopefully the example was taken from streaming and that’s why it looks so much worse)
- crazygringo 2y ago
  Oh yeah. Totally agreed on not changing the color grading. That's as big as changing the music. With blogs that take screenshots of 4K content though, sometimes that's using a media player with poor HDR color decoding though. Bad HDR always winds up with a green tint, that's the telltale sign. VLC is the worst with that. But I don't think that's the case here. There are definitely a lot of rereleases with badly done color.

jonathanlydall 2y ago

I watched Aliens at least half a dozen times (still one of my all time favourites), and only noticed it when a friend pointed it out to us as it was playing at New Year’s party.

haunter 2y ago

I hate editing mistakes more. The Aviator has quite a few of these where for example in cut A two characters talk by walking side by side, in cut B they stop and turn towards each other (still talking), and in cut C they continue the talking but you can see cut A and C are the continuation of each other and cut B was inserted in the middle https://files.catbox.moe/dljiiw.mp4 https://files.catbox.moe/dljiiw.mp4 And that's just one example that film is full of those. Here is another jarring one https://files.catbox.moe/9m3gjq.mp4 https://files.catbox.moe/9m3gjq.mp4 Despite that it won the Academy Award for Best Editing...

alabastervlog 2y ago
I’ve managed to make myself so sensitive to this that I get all tense when there’s a multi-camera setup for a conversation, waiting for the moment when they cut from A to B and someone’s hands or head have teleported to a slightly (and sometimes not slightly!) different position. Very few such sequences complete without my noticing some spot where shots don’t match up. Another one is key lights reflected in eyeballs. Nearly ruins Jackson’s LOTR trilogy for me, it’s in basically every damn scene. In several shots you can practically diagram out their whole lighting rig from a the reflections on an actor’s eye, so many lights are plainly and distinctly visible. You see it some in lots of movies but OMG it’s bad in those.
- andrewinardeer 2y ago
  I have always considered it an actors job to ensure their hands or cigarette or whatever are in the same position when they hit the same word during multiple takes.
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    It's never going to be perfect or identical. Actors' #1 job is to give an emotionally believable, powerful performance. A thousand little details are different in every take, and your movements will change to reflect what is authentic in the moment. In fact, editors want emotional variety so that they have more options in assembling the scene. Yes, things are blocked ahead of time. You'll stand up at the same moment, you'll stop walking at a particular mark. But there are limits, especially with things like hands and cigarettes. If you look for continuity errors around those, you'll find them everywhere. Actors, directors and editors have more important things to worry about.

sickcodebruh 2y ago

There’s a really funny duality to mistakes in recorded art that is vastly different when viewed as a fan and the creator. As a music fan, I really love little mistakes in incredible albums. They’re humanizing, they show that the recording was made by people and it makes the highs feel so much higher. As an artist, I loathe mistakes in my own work and I will spend a basically limitless amount of time fixing annoying performance quirks in software — I’m talking things that I can do but didn’t get quite right — so I can listen to it without distraction or regrets. I know that nobody will notice these except me and the type of listener who does catch them will either not mind or appreciate it the way I would. But when it’s my own work, it’s different. I’m sure it’s the same for filmmakers so I understand the impulse to fix it later.

DangitBobby 2y ago
I'm sure if artists didn't obsess over the work like you do, it wouldn't be nearly as fun to find them as a fan.
djaychela 2y ago
>As a music fan, I really love little mistakes in incredible albums. Me too. For me as a Genesis fan since I was a teenager, the worst example of a change has been the 'remastered' version of Supper's ready. There's a 'mistake' in the bass part right at the end, which to me is absolutely beautiful. It's about 22:46 in, right at the fade, and he plays the wrong bass note, a tone (I think) above what should be there, and then resolves down to the root note of the chord. Always loved this, it sounds lyrical and works really well. And in the remastered version, it's not there, he goes straight to the root note. And for me, it ruins 20+ minutes of buildup. I never listen to the remastered version and I'm glad I ripped my CDs back in the day so I have a record of the original (and for me, far better) bass part. Yes, it's only one note, but it's a great note!

codeflo 2y ago

Looking at the green screen shots of that Mustafar fight in Episode III: If that was the actual lighting of the in-camera scene, then it's not a mystery at all that everything in that movie looked so fake.

Cthulhu_ 2y ago
I want to believe they've improved the process by a lot since then, including getting the lighting right. Although I'm sure most of that is done in post-processing. The making of The Mandalorian is interesting though, by using a projected screen as the set rendered in realtime, they can get the environmental lighting on the actors correct as well without much post-processing.
- joshvm 2y ago
  The Volume is pretty cool. A practical version of this that's often overlooked is Oblivion (probably because the plot is naff). The "sky tower" set is physical with 270 degrees of front projection to handle the sky. It would have been a lot harder to convincingly re-create all the optical effects and not worry about what light would look like scattered off glass or other occluding objects. https://www.fdtimes.com/2013/03/29/claudio-miranda-asc-on-oblivion/ https://www.fdtimes.com/2013/03/29/claudio-miranda-asc-on-ob... Another example is the motion simulator/projector setup from First Man, which makes the cockpit and landing sequences look so good. They won best VFX. https://youtu.be/sw57ORTgGG4?si=NjRNt551HJhL_l9k&t=193 https://youtu.be/sw57ORTgGG4?si=NjRNt551HJhL_l9k&t=193 (relevant footage starts around 3:13) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UChwuyWVzsI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UChwuyWVzsI
- DidYaWipe 2y ago
  Yes, but using LED walls like that has a drawback: The scene is baked in. Although it generally looks better than greenscreen, you can't change it afterward.
alabastervlog 2y ago
By Episode II, Lucas had decided to make damn near everything green screen. They weren’t even building chairs and benches the actors sat on. Green boxes in many cases. It looked like complete shit even by the standards of the time, and of course hasn’t aged well. I watched a “film edits” fan edit of the Clone Wars CG cartoon, and one of the odder things about the experience was the end, where the editor cut together the final arc of that show, another shorter 2D cartoon, and the live action (well… mostly also just CG) Revenge of the Sith in roughly chronological order (including some nifty simultaneous action bits). What was so odd was how very much worse and less-real-feeling the “live action” film was than the wholly CG cartoon. The writing, the line delivery, the sets, the action, the editing—it was all worse and came off as far more fake than a literal cartoon.

glacier5674 2y ago

[dead]

bombcar 2y ago

Does that Civil War movie have a modern electrical box in the background? Because that's what it looks like to me - totally distracted me from the watch.

pavlov 2y ago

Seeing the original live action footage reminds how challenging these productions must have been for the actors. There's nothing around you but green screen and a stunt rigger. The dialog sucks and you're little more than a puppet in these action sequences, week after week of shoots. Lucas wanted to push the digital envelope, but the contemporary Harry Potter films also by ILM have aged much better because they relied on physical sets and practical effects as much as possible. You can tell the actors are actually within a world.

93po 2y ago
off the top of my head i thought the hp films have tons of digital effects that has aged poorly that could have been pratical and been much better, but after some research there was actually an absolute ton that would now 100% just be CGI these days. i do however thing house elves and centaurs and dementors could have been more practical and possibly been better? hard to say though. like even most full body shots of hagrid was a robot-face version of him

mproud 2y ago

How is this different than say a literary author who was let know of an error after publication and fixed it with a re-release of a book?

_wire_ 2y ago

In the referenced video, there's a clip from the movie Glory where a fair-skinned hand with a digital watch is in the frame. I like to think this must be a glib reference to Blake Edward's' The Party (1968) in which Peter Sellers dresses in dark face to play Hrundi V. Bakshi, who is introduced as a hapless Hollywood extra on the set of an Alamo-style Western. After a cut, the director asks Bakshi what time it is and Bakshi looks at his huge underwater wristwatch to tell him the time, then sheepishly realizes his mistake as the director goes apoplectic.

_wire_ 2y ago
My bad re Party reference... From imdb trivia: //The sequence in which Peter Sellers's character plays his bugle to rouse his troops is a satire of Gunga Din (1939).//

nickvec 2y ago

Great writeup, though a bit confusing to first refer to Anakin as Darth Vader when the scene takes place prior to that development in the Star Wars arc.

kevinventullo 2y ago
Technically the emperor dubs Anakin as Vader just after the showdown where Anakin betrays Mace Windu. The battle with Obi-Wan happens after that. I’m not normally this pedantic, but on the topic of Star Wars it somehow feels appropriate.
- nickvec 2y ago
  TIL, honestly have only watched Star Wars once, so I appreciate the correction.

dfxm12 2y ago

I'm sure most people know the story. In the Twin Peaks pilot, a mirror reflection of a set dresser was briefly caught by the camera. Instead of editing this out of reshooting, David Lynch gave him a role in the show. Anyway, movies can have revisions. A movie is as much a commercial product as it is art. I don't see why people need to get all righteous about it, especially in cases where directors, actors, etc., don't care. Novels get revisions. Even fine art prints may have editions with differences between them. Old wood blocks by a famous artist may even be restruck decades later by a different person. They're still recognized as the piece.

toyg 2y ago
> David Lynch gave him a role in the show Not just "a" role - he became "the" key role in the series, the evil spirit that moves the entire plot. Which was both absolute genius (turning a mistake into the first, menacing appearance of a key character) and absolute madness (how do you hand a key character of your expensive production to a random set-dresser with almost no acting career?!?). David Lynch in a nutshell.
- defrost 2y ago
  Would that be worse than hiring a set carpenter for a key role in billion dollar franchise? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Ford https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Ford It's Hollywood, every busboy and valet is a role deficit actor in waiting.
  - toyg 2y ago
    Star Wars was definitely not a billion-dollar franchise at that time. Alec McGuinness famously negotiated to earn a percentage of gross revenue, because the salary offered was a pittance and he didn't expect any profits to ever be generated by such a bad production. And Ford had already worked as an actor in American Graffiti.
thebruce87m 2y ago
Didn’t know this, more info here: > In the final scene, where Sarah Palmer has an upsetting vision, one can briefly make out the reflection of Set Decorator Frank Silva in the mirror behind her. When this was called to Lynch's attention on the set, he was overjoyed and shouted "PERFECT!" This is how Frank Silva was chosen to play the character of Killer BOB. https://twinpeaks.fandom.com/wiki/Pilot https://twinpeaks.fandom.com/wiki/Pilot

strunz 2y ago

We really couldn't get the name of the person whose face has been accidentally in a movie that's part of one of the great pieces of pop culture on modern history? Was really more interested to know who it was, what exactly he was doing, and what he thinks about it.

tvaziri 2y ago
we tried VERY hard - couldn't find him

gorfian_robot 2y ago

some folks here might be interested in the Despecialized Editions of the Star Wars films https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmy%27s_Despecialized_Edition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmy%27s_Despecialized_Editio...

Pikamander2 2y ago

Another infamous example is that they accidentally left a Starbucks cup on the table in the final season of Game Of Thrones: https://i.imgur.com/5tlRhti.png https://i.imgur.com/5tlRhti.png Taking into account the already-negative reception of the final season, it became symbolic of the show's decline in quality. The cup was edited out in later releases. Family Guy also did a quick cutaway gag of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGIpZk4SKTI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGIpZk4SKTI

Trixter 2y ago

> Painting out these movie mistakes as part of a restoration is wrong. As part of a restoration, yes. As part of a remaster, no. If the remaster is overseen by the primary creative (such as everything done to the Aliens UHD 4k release, which was overseen and approved by Cameron), then it's official -- and as an audience member, you have to examine how you feel about that. For example, some enthusiasts lament the removal of film grain in Aliens, but Cameron has said in interviews that he hated the grain in Aliens because he was forced to use a particular film stock and didn't like the result. So it was never the director's vision to have excessive grain in that movie, and the audience should accept the 4k UHD release as canonical and authorized. These debates are colored (no pun intended) by nostalgia, much like the vinyl vs. digital debates.

the_af 2y ago
Movies don't belong exclusively to their authors. They belong to audiences as well, if not more. If I hate the color grading of a remaster, and this becomes the only version readily available, I don't care whether the original author oversaw the process -- it's a net negative. And this garbage with color grading happens often :(

clemiclemen 2y ago

A bit late to the party but there is a famous French internet show called "Faux-raccord" which does exactly what this article does: every episode is focused on mistakes for some movie, told by the duo Michel and Michel with some jokes along the way. Very pleasant to watch :-) Link: https://www.allocine.fr/video/programme-12284/ https://www.allocine.fr/video/programme-12284/ Youtube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTbUDA_Dd9s&list=PLAUaCoiUsxl5dhnCco7joRMFs1ydrqbXN https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTbUDA_Dd9s&list=PLAUaCoiUsx...