'Miami Vice': This is the future of movie photography?

The box office for Miami Vice plummeted over 60 percent in its second week, as word of mouth got around that this was one of those terrible films that only talented people can make. It does what hacks would never dream of doing: seamlessly jettisoning everything that made the TV show so popular — the eye-candy visuals, the music — in favor of... what, exactly?

It's certainly not the script, which is a retread of the Glenn Frey Smuggler's Blues episode, and would do just fine for 60 or 90 minutes, but at two hours and 12 minutes is an insane self-indulgence. It's certainly not the charmlessly brooding Colin Farrell, one of those mildly cute, mildly talented people that Hollywood tries to cram down everybody's throat in spite of the fact he seems subtly wrong and inauthentic in every part he plays. Eventually, after the accumulated loss of hundreds of millions of dollars, people will awaken to the fact that he's not a movie star.

Universal Pictures Read reviews of "Miami Vice."

Oh, and one other thing — it's certainly not the vaunted digital production, because Miami Vice looks awful. At somewhere between $135 million and $150 million — accounts differ — this may be the seediest-looking big budget movie ever. It has all the physical texture of a student film, but at professional prices.

Digital production is the latest false savior seized on by Hollywood. The appeal is obvious. It's quicker, faster, can be used with what amounts to available light, is easier to play with in post-production, and you can see what you've got almost immediately. Mainly, it's cheaper, although film stock is a very minor part of a film budget, and the use of digital certainly did nothing to keep Miami Vice from going far over budget.

As soon as the industry settles the question of who's going to pay for the installation of digital projection at thousands of theaters, the savings will really kick in. At that point, digital projection will undoubtedly be imposed, whether we like it or not, whether it's at all comparable to film projection or not. The reason, as with so many other things, is money.

A single 35-millimeter print (the standard type of print you see in theaters) costs around $2,000. Figure a couple of thousand prints per picture, then spread that over a release schedule of, say, 15 pictures, add in the shipping costs that will be obliterated by either digital downloads or projecting DVDs onto the movie screen, and you're talking enough money to pay for the production of a major motion picture, although I think it's safe to say that's not what the money will be used for.

I know what you're thinking: another Luddite rant about the ugly future and the beautiful past. And here's where I surprise you: Film moving through the gears of a camera, being developed and edited and packed onto reels and shipped across the country on trucks, said heavy reels being dropped off at each theater, then threaded and moving through more gears and projected before an audience has been around for well over a century. It's the entertainment equivalent of the internal combustion engine, and it just reeks of a smokestack.

But is digital really the answer? While I've seen some amazing, state-of-the-art digital projection equipment, those units are always used to project an image 20-30 feet, tops. I haven't seen any digital projection that can throw a picture the distance that a decent-sized multiplex auditorium needs without serious degradation in the image.

With digital, there's frequently a maddening strobe effect during any kind of fast motion, although that was more in evidence in Mann's previous digitally produced film, Collateral, where the content seemed more appropriate for the medium, although it wasn't any easier on the eyes. (Oddly, that strobing is much less in evidence in other digitally produced movies, such as the last two Star Wars movies, which, in spite of their nominal narrative idiocy — I'm still trying to figure out Anakin Skywalker's motivation for becoming Darth Vader — looked all shiny and bright and rather attractive.)

Miami Vice exposes some of the inherent problems of digital in a blunt way. Digital lacks the definition of film, it lacks the color capacity of film and, oddly, it seems to lack a sense of depth. In Miami Vice, everything seems to be taking place on one plane; there is very little evidence of foreground, middle ground and background.

Mann is one of the few people in the American movie business who can be considered an artist, and some of the drab visuals of the film may very well be intentional — idiotic, but intentional.

Granted, some of this is subjective; my lit-by-a-flashlight obscurity is your thrilling chiaroscuro — but through most of the film I sat there thinking to myself: This is the future of movie photography? This imposed grunge aesthetic?

I've seen porn that looked better. For that matter, an average episode of Cops looks better, less grainy. In shot after shot, Mann luxuriates in digital grain, sometimes zooming in, not for any narrative reason, but to accentuate the grain, like some art school undergraduate in love with texture for its own sake, forgetting that people don't pay money to see texture, they pay money to see story and character.

The great cameraman John Bailey (Ordinary People, Silverado) shot a film on digital a few years ago, and emerged saying that "There isn't anything about digital I couldn't have done better and just as quickly (on) film." George Lucas responded, somewhat defensively, that the format is in its infancy and can only get better, but then he hadn't seen the visuals of Miami Vice.

Miami Vice may be the first — and please, God, let it be the last — movie whose subject seems to be pixels. If there's any justice, it might push back the inevitable influx of digital production and exhibition until the format is comparable to film. It may happen, but it's not there yet, not by a long shot. Or a close-up.

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Palm Beach Post Books Editor Scott Eyman is a film historian and author of several books on Hollywood, including biographies of John Ford, Ernst Lubitsch and Louis B. Mayer, and a history of the transition from silent film to sound.