The thing I thought Scorsese would have also criticized was Marvel's standardization of acting in green screen environments & what that's done to the calibration of actors' performances. There is something to be said of what actors can produce when immersed in space & place.
Thinking of some popular Hollywood hits like 'Hollow Man' or even the more classic 'Terminator' series which clearly relied on heavy visual/special effects but were so saturated with the space they were set in & the drama that it entailed. I think the Marvel era has killed that.
The visuals of space, planets, aliens created entirely through hi-tech imaging software in particular are so dispiriting in how little curiosity there is about place, about nature & biology, about about that final frontier & the import it has for human life.
There were literal moments in Endgame where I wanted to pause & ask the director, can we be a little more curious about Vormir & Knowhere, what is their atmosphere like? Do they have water bodies? What sort of bacteria, insect life, plant life, exist here?
I think provoking audiences to speculate is the most important element of SFF writing. They dont have to tell us but they have to allow us a moment or two to indulge that & MCU films obviously have little patience for the genre. They just reproduce cops & robbers in outer space.
That too cops & robbers who have to face each other off in sterile green screen studios. Whereas think of James Cameron who filmed one of Terminator 2's scenes in a seedy bar across the street where Rodney King was beaten & bad T-1000 robot was an LAPD cop in that film. Like wow.
Anyway, I think Cameron presents a more interesting counterpoint to MCU, in that he is invested in politicizing the spaces he's able to create with his special effects. Now if only he could find better screenwriters for the task...
Ian McKellan, while on 'The Hobbit':
"I cried, actually. I cried. Then I said out loud, 'This is not why I became an actor'.
digitalspy.com/movies/a439066…
"I cried, actually. I cried. Then I said out loud, 'This is not why I became an actor'.
digitalspy.com/movies/a439066…
