This isn’t so much a review of the film as it is a brief look into Bay’s place in, dare I say, cinema history, specifically his place in the current film vs. digital battle being waged.
I hesitate to say “if you know how you feel about Bay, you know how you’ll feel about this movie” or something to that degree. While it’s accurate, I think Bay and cinema are more interesting than that and shouldn’t be dismissed so easily. But I’m saying it now because I think even Bay’s harshest critics should take a look at the movie from this perspective.
The advent of digital cinema has been met with both criticism and open arms. Those that embrace it have done so for different, sometimes complimentary reasons. One way to look at it is from an efficiency perspective, an “easier” and cheaper medium to replace film, while another way to look at it is for its own unique photographic traits that are distinguished from film.
The efficiency mentality can be found in interviews with David Fincher, who liked being able to shoot his movies faster and being able to look at the image immediately without having to wait for dailies. But this mentality has its own artistic merit, as some directors view it as a way of having more artistic control over a project. James Cameron said as much regarding CGI and how he would have made Titanic if he had the tools he had today;
“If I did Titanic (1997) today, I’d do it very differently. There wouldn’t be a 750-foot-long set. There would be small set pieces integrated into a large CGI set. I wouldn’t have to wait seven days to get the perfect sunset for the kiss scene. We’d shoot it in front of a green screen, and we’d choose our sunset.”
George Lucas also referred to these distinctions in an interview with American Cinematographer;
“There is the very real issue that you are going from a photographic medium to a painterly medium, and for those who are really wedded to the photographic process, that’s going to be a tough thing to get around. It’s very much like going from frescoes to oils – one is very rigid, very disciplined, very definite about the way it works, and the other is much more open, offers you more options and enables you to manipulate the pictures more, and I think that bothers people.”
But with this mentality can come a desire to replicate that “film look” as its called. Filmmakers like Michael Mann reject that and used digital cameras for their own distinct look. His first primarily digitally shot film, Collateral (whose cinematographer, Dion Beebe, also shot 13 Hours) used digital cinematography to capture the L.A. night as its own character. This unique digital look can be found in this following clip;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX9JNJThhxY
But the initial rejection of digital cinematography primarily came from it being lesser when it started, which was accurate. Michael Bay was a part of this rejection, and expressed as much when he was forced to shoot Transformers: Dark of The Moon digitally in 3D, as modern 3D cameras are exclusively digital and Bay wasn’t satisfied with the place conversions were at the time to convert an entire movie. Still, even though he shot the film in 3D, he wasn’t initially happy about it.
“Digital, no matter what people tell you, it’s bullshit. They say, “Oh, it looks just like film.” It doesn’t look like film and never will. And it’s like those people that are telling you are technicians. But I will be able to tweak film better than you tweak a digital image, because it just can’t hold really bright skies to this black thing. You have to favor one thing. If I favored her, that would go much wider.
Whereas film, you would be able to get more blue out of it or whatever. And you can’t really do that with digital. So they’re lying to you when they say it looks just like film. It doesn’t. And when you shoot 3D, technically you give up some color, you give up some sharpness, you give up brightness. But you get the added benefit of seeing 3D.”
Dark of The Moon also rejected digital’s unique photographic traits by trying to go for “that film look”, even shooting and converting as much as 30% of the movie on film. These were reserved for things like slow-motion shots or shots that Bay wanted a higher “resolution” on.
Bay’s next film, Pain and Gain, wasn’t shot in 3D and so he went back to film. When he did Transformers: Age of Extinction, that was in 3D and therefore required digital cameras.
But he did something different this time.
Having used IMAX film cameras for Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen three films prior, Bay decided to use newly developed digital 4K IMAX 3D cameras for AoE. These cameras are not as good as IMAX film cameras, but they are breathtaking, and new digital IMAX cameras have been developed since that are inching closer and closer to IMAX film quality (these cameras were used first in Captain America: Civil War and will be used in Transformers: The Last Knight).
Originally intended for select sequences, he went to shoot 60% of the film with the cameras, going so far as to request IMAX develop him another one. The movie definitely maintains that film look, but there are many shots that are very Mann like, embracing digital’s unique photographic traits. Examples of this can be found starting at 6:18 in the following clip.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UExyaN8AHGw
The scene is not presented in its native IMAX ratio, but as someone that owns the edition of the film that maintains the ratio, I can verify that many of these shots originated from IMAX cameras.
I think Age of Extinction’s place in film history is tremendously important. If IMAX is the pinnacle of image quality, the destination at the end of the path, and IMAX cameras were originally film only, then it follows that film was the path to that destination, and thus the film look was associated with the path.
Age of Extinction’s digital IMAX images flip this notion on its head. The destination remains the same but there is a new way to get to this destination. New options. A new path.
But even so, Age of Extinction’s exciting embracing and celebration of digital as its own format remains connected with the necessary evil for 3D mentality. He still shot it digitally because he was shooting it in 3D.
And this is where 13 Hours comes in.
Shot digitally in 2D, Bay, one of the strongest, most adamant film advocates in this battle, has embraced the format without any sense of it being a necessary evil. The 3D necessary evil is not present, and while efficiency purposes were also present in his decision, he doesn’t degrade or dismiss the format by nostalgically striving for “that film look.”
He shot it digitally and wanted digital images. And if someone as stern and strongly involved in his imagery as Michael Bay has embraced the format, one can only wonder what the future of cinema will look like.
devilsadvocritic 