Re: Zero Dark Thirty
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Casey Simpson</div><div class="ubbcode-body">
Generally, movies suck, especially those made by Hollywood; what sells is what is important. Movie makers make movies to make money - not to be realistic or accurate. Accurate counting money. That's it.</div></div>
Yes and no. Yes, they are about making money because they are expensive gambles. ZDT had a relatively modest budget of $40 million but some summer blockbusters end up costing $200+ million and that doesn't even factor in marketing costs. If successful, yes they can bring in a lot of money, but if they bomb, that's a serious chunk of change down the drain. That's why most studios hedge their bets as much as possible, some better than others; the result of which is often why we see so many remakes and sequels lately.
As for accuracy in military films, you've just got to face the fact that it's something not everyone is good at. It cracks me up when I read the things people say here about Hollywood, it's composition and the people that work on films - it's like asking a military questions at Huffington post and seeing the responses: ignorant, but expected. The fact of the matter is that film making is a messy process that involves a lot of people working together who often don't always see eye to eye.
I came into the industry feeling like it didn't take much extra effort to "get things right" but after several years I can say that it's not as easy as you think. Often major productions will have military advisors on set but it's often not as simple as saying "this should go here, that should go there." Filmmaking is seriously dynamic, like the order of a stack as you flow through a structure - it changes several times throughout the day and many of the changes can be unforeseen. And as the production adjusts it often goes against what the advisors are saying, which creates a dilemma: can we fix this and make it more accurate or is it going to delay production and cost too much?
How productions deal with those problems often is the difference between accuracy/realism and not. And again, some put more of an emphasis on this than others and others are just better at this. And when you're the guy on set or in post-production trying to correct things, it gets very difficult to win the argument for accuracy and realism when the reality is 90% of the public won't know the difference. And then there are the directors who say, "yeah, but this way will be way cooler." Again, some are better at it than others.
Case in point, I was on the post-production for "Flags of Our Fathers" and in numerous situations VFX Supervisor Mike Owens and director Clint Eastwood both agreed to spend more time and money to correct things (within reason) to make them more accurate. For example, there's an all CG shot in the film where you're looking through the cockpit of a Corsair strafing a gun emplacement on Mt.Surabachi. The FX artist doing the rocket impacts made these extremely difficult, beautiful fluid simulations of fiery explosions that everyone loved. But I lobbied heavily for them to make it less of a Michael Bay explosion and more realistic, to which they pointed me to reference of a Corsair dropping napalm in Korea. Wrong reference! Now it broke the heart of the artist doing that effect but in the end they okayed the change and it's now why you see lots of dirt, smoke, sparks and sand bags on impact instead of a big napalm blast.
It's little victories like that that go unappreciated and often ignored. Yes, we need more of them and it's really up to the team making the film (including the studio that's bankrolling the picture) to take the effort to get it right. Some are easier than others, like in the first "Transformers" film they had PEQ-2 lasers visible in bright sunlight, coming out of the barrels of their carbines. After pointing out the obvious, it was agreed that the lasers needed to be visible because they were a key story point in the scene, but at least they moved them to the right emission point.
Chill out - some of us are working very hard to get it right and I'm sorry shit's not 100% all the time. It's not like Hollywood is full of veterans (yet).
