Desaturation and low contrast are getting really tired at this point. It's going to date movies of the past dozen years or so.

Once AI-generated movies are widely available,
we will no longer be debating the issue of film versus digital, but rather genuine human-created art versus the prompting of text on a computer.

The reality is that film imperfections create an unreal quality that took us out of reality and into “the movies”. Digital is so real we end up noticing we’re not in “the movie”. That, and the fact it allows so much to be fixed in post, whereas with film you need to get it right on set. Oh, and also the current trend for not pushing the full dynamic range in the grade (for some reason) so everything just looks too muddy and flat.

The part that baffles me is the 'modern colorists bringing down their highlights and bring up the lows' like wtf?  We spent decades trying to get crisp dynamic range with pristine highs and deep lows, and now that we have all that capability, you're going to flatten it out so it looks like an LCD screen with poor settings?  Never understood this.  I hate when i see some movie or show with the Netflix lighting and I cringe because I'm sure they're using excellent modern gear that old school DP's would have loved to have access to, and they're wasting it on bland soft lighting coverage and boring contrast-less color-grading.  

I wonder if we know who started the de-saturation trend? Maybe Janus Kaminksy?

Digital has made some crews lazy. I can’t stand flat looking night scenes shot without decent lighting. Yeah, it looks “real”, but not as good as night shots that used strong key lights.

All those possibilities of digital postproduction; and, yet, modern movies look uniform and uninspired

Film is the best medium for preserving movies.

Actually, when film went digital, not only they lost everything.
But even modern film cinema looks more boring and lifeless compared to 30-90s.
The reason is simple: the art was destroyed by the industry.

for me it all comes down to 1 thing " Choice " Digital and especially post introduced an infinite array of choices after the fact , so directors and studio heads nolonger shoot a movie with set decisions made , this forces DPs to light in a flat way or scripts being written in such a way that anything can happen in the edit or actors can be fired and replaced without affecting the rest of the story


...we need more intentionality and a singulr vision in our movies where storytelling is key , now its all cooperate slop just to make as much profit as possible

Highlights are gone. Every image looks flat. Lighting absolutely makes a difference

One thing I think people also forget about the transition is the difficulty of shooting on film lead to more purposeful shooting. I think Samuel L Jackson said in an interview that modern, younger directors, just start shooting. Back then you couldn’t. You really had to think through and plan each shot. Now you don’t have to so we get lesser quality.

I like to add one thing what also happened: Lost knowledge.

There was plenty of artist doing CGI without working on miniatures, and they didn't know what they were doing. Film to digital transition seems to caused lost knowledge in colors. Concept of memory color effect was lost and there was horrible color grading instead. Heavy use of green screen caused lost of knowledge how to make shot feel right. It was not the green screen, they forgot to add sweat, close up shots touching in environment..

Digital cameras are great but there are lot of issues that are not related to that.

And then we got Christopher Nolan who shot a movie in 70mm film with dull colours.

The delicate visual language of cinema has been spoiled by the gradual overcoming of all the limitations and frictions that in the past gave us the rich expression and accumulated discipline of the art. Now everything goes because... we can?
Storytelling immersion gave way to forgettable spectacle consumption.

This is why Hollywood needs old-school titans to remind everyone of the importance of traditional filmmaking

i grew up on kid and family movies, some animated but that's missing nowadays

The problem with digital film is that it is always clean and perfect. The real world is not. The slight imperfection in film really grounds it in realism.

Thank you Keanu for explaning this.

It's colorblind idiots behind a computer keyboard who think the only colors that exist in the world are desaturated teal and orange.  That's why nothing looks good anymore.

The thing is the silver-halide on celluloid Film captures the light and image just as our eyes would expet. But digital image sensors all merely "Interpret" the incoming light and picture. And ALL of them do it differently. Some look sterile and clean and boring (like the Arri Alexa.....)  and others look surprisingly filmic. Filmstock also comes in various selections and back in the day when more manufacturers made it, you had a range of different looks. This is also why certain 35mm Theatrical prints look so different. The movie you saw in theaters back then may have looked a little diffferent for others in other cinemas.

And then there is another thing. The physical Shutter Blade inside a camera. The thing that spins and opens and closes at fast speed, making sure the film behind it gets exposed at the desired framerate, like a normal photo camera would exposure the film but just much faster, frame by frame. Naturally digital filmcameras (or Videocameras) don't have that. Their shutter is electronically calculated. And that also changes the way the image looks compared to being shot on film.

And of course... the whole drama about movie grading..... Back in the day you could not alter a films colors and looks SOOO drastically and detailed like you can do now with digital editing suits and color-curve tools. It was a strictly chemical process where you had to sit with a stopwatch and alter the chemical process during development of the filmstock to get a certain look. This is also how the original "Bleached Bypass" look came to be, by how long you keep the filmstock in the developer liquids.


The way movies are lit for scenes has also changed. Since digital image sensors are naturally more light sensitive than film, most DoPs and directors are not really considering proper lighting anymore and always live under the impression that if they shoot everything with a neutral flat "LOG" gamma curve, they can somehow "fix it in post".