Why are Movies so Dark?

Movies are not intended to be real.  That always feels like a weird sentence to put into the world, but it's true, and should maybe be uttered more often.  Frequently when we watch a film, we marvel at the realism that happens onscreen, and there's something to that.  Getting to see an increasingly violent or harrowing moment in a film like 1917, where an out-of-nowhere plane crash suddenly upends our hero's journey, is staggering and breathtaking.  But increasingly, I think that that strive for realism, which is a fun addition, but again not necessary for a movie to be good (otherwise, you know, we wouldn't have unreal things like wizards and dragons and aliens and vampires across our cinematic landscape) has gotten us into the world of lazy filmmaking.

I've talked about this in the past with a film like Tenet, which is a solid movie filled with a really good, sexy performance from Robert Pattinson, and splendid visual effects & art direction.  But it also has truly awful sound design.  I will say this until my face is blue, but when an explosion is happening onscreen, it's not super important to the audience that they understand it's loud-a bomb went off or a car just went fifty feet into the air, we know it's loud.  If there's dialogue being spoken onscreen, we should be able to hear it unless the other characters cannot hear what's happening.  It's bad sound mixing even if it's realistic to the movie itself, to need to, say, turn on the captions to be able to understand what the other actor clearly can understand being said.  Unless the other actor is saying "I can't hear you" the audience should know what was just said-value your script.

But the biggest trend, and this is well-documented, is around cinematography in movies lately.  This has been proven categorically, but movies have gotten increasingly darker.  There are a variety of reasons for this happening, and part of it does have to do with technology.  Moving from film, which you couldn't see in the moment and therefore it made the most sense to lens the movie awash with light so you didn't have to worry about not being able to see, to digital (which allowed for you to instantly replay the film) meant that you could play more with lighting on a screen.  It also is an easy sort of "filter" to help distract when visual effects shots aren't as impressive as they should be (as they are expensive) or to hide a mistake like a rogue rope from a light or stunt effect showing up in the background.

This isn't just films with small budgets, though.  Recent movies like Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania were made for hundreds of millions of dollars...but there are entire sequences where it looks like the actors are fumbling in a room for the light switch.  This means you can't see the movie.  The worst offenders might be television, particularly Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon, where you're struggling to find the brightness settings on your TV just to have the scantest idea of what is happening onscreen.

Some people have claimed this is intentional, and maybe it is.  Fabian Wagner, the cinematographer for Game of Thrones, specifically said the battle in the episode "The Long Night" which was anticipated by fans almost from the beginning, was intentionally shot as if it was nighttime.  I watched it on a television set in Birmingham, Alabama, at a Holiday Inn...and I could see maybe half of the show (at most).  If this was intentional, then the cinematographers were wrong.  I don't care the artistic intentions, sometimes artists make mistakes, and in this case, I'm saying it-making a movie you can't see is stupid, and a waste of money (and my time).

There are ways to instruct the viewer that it's nighttime without actually making everything onscreen pitch black.  Use a different lighting filter, have some sort of blue or purple or grey sheen to instruct us it's night-movies have done that for decades.  But you don't need to make it look like actual night for the audience to get it, and having it look like actual darkness for extended sequences is going to pull the audience out of the film or show rather than put them into it.  I didn't enjoy "The Long Night" because I spent half of the episode fumbling around with my remote assuming that the TV was broken-that's not a good television experience, it's not giving your audience something worthwhile.  Similar to the sound argument, the only reason you shouldn't be able to clearly differentiate what is happening onscreen is if it's either reflecting what's happening onscreen or it's specifically intended to be a metaphor.  Think of the subway scene in Scream VI, where one of our characters isn't sure how close the approaching Ghostface killer is, and the lights flicker off so you don't understand exactly what's happening, similar to the actor onscreen.  That is a moment where it's okay to give us a dark screen, indecipherable as we try to find our bearings in the same way as the performer while a possible villain approaches...that adds to what's happening onscreen.  But when movies like Black Panther and Game of Thrones have this for extended, 20-30 minute sequences, no matter what filmmakers proclaim, it's not immersive or edgy or enhancing the mood...it's just hurting my eyes and making me wish I was watching something else.  I am all about shadowy cinematography-I love the work of someone like Roger Deakins or Gregg Toland who plays with light & darkness to enhance the story.  But I'm sick-and-tired of paying money for a movie that the entire audience has to squint to see...do better Hollywood.