Wed 22 Oct 2008

The Art Of Max Payne

After being brought down with an ear ache over the last few days, I felt vaguely human again yesterday and wanted to get out — anywhere but here! — for a while. So I wandered around the city a bit and ended up going to a movie, since Tuesday is cheap day in Sydney. The only movie on was Max Payne, about which I knew nothing beyond having seen the trailer. The movie itself was nothing special. I'm not a good judge of that sort of "game to movie" conversion, but it seemed like a fairly formulaic plot and standard ending. Nothing special, but I had no real expectations to begin with and I don't mind the occasional really bad movie, so I didn't feel entirely ripped off. As a movie on its own, it's something like 4 or 5/10. This isn't a review, though

One aspect stood out, once I realised didn't need to exactly concentrate on the storyline: It was a beautifully filmed and edited movie, outside of the action sequences (which were a bit "blah"). Almost as if a comic book was being filmed. This is really a combined piece of work from the director of photography and the editor (providing the images and then weaving them together), along with possibly/probably some post-production CGI teams.

I can't think of a Hollywood-style movie recently where negative space has been used quite so well, without making everything just seem dark and confusing. That's hard to pull off because there needs to be something going on so that your eye knows what to follow and, yet it has to be slowly paced enough that you can take in the scene and take in the shot. There were a lot of scene-setting shots in Max Payne that were anywhere from one to three or four seconds in length that really worked well like that.

Similarly, snow was used throughout the movie as a pace indicator. In the "nothing going on here; look at how calm it is" shots — usually right before somebody was taken by surprise — the snow would drift down, or across the screen in a calm fashion. As the pace picked up, or Max was going somewhere purposefully, the snow would be more windblown and piled beside the footpaths and roads that were clean from all the activity they were sustaining. Without any big sign being used, it was easy to tell when we were in calm or desolate mode and when things were more edgy and taking place in busy or recently-active areas.

The colour choices were another area that were cleverly handled once I started paying attention. It was all relatively realistic, but dark, looking colours, except when the mythological, hallucinatory aspects were part of the story. Yet, there was still a lot of clever cutting and use of warm lit areas and colder, streetlight-only sections.

None of this was particularly unsubtle. It was just something I noticed fairly early on and then started really paying attention to. Even the worst movies (and this was hardly the worst movie of all time) provide something to watch if you aren't the hooked on the story being shown. So I'll add this to my list of attempts to set the scene and mood in a slightly different way.

Topics: art/design, entertainment/movies