Even though Black Hawk turns convention on its head it's 'justified'. On the other hand I found it over done in Traffic, to the point of it being a statement of "look how far I can turn this knob".

On a similar note there's a great article over on COW about sound design. It's billed as an article on ADR which it isn't, link here.The Youtube videos embedded in the article are a good watch, especially the one on Wall-E. Be prepared for a surprise when it's revealed how the sound of Wall-E was created :) Worth a mention that it was pointed out that not so long ago the entire sound of a movie involved two people, today the list of credits can to over fivety.

One reason I keep pushing the audio side of what we do is it's pretty well nigh impossible to make vision look like a million dollar effort on the big screen without spending millions of dollars. But it doesn't cost much to make it sound like a million dollars, just some not overly expensive decent kit and a bucket load of skill and Vegas and maybe a few extra plugins.

Bob.

A lot of movies overdo it, but at least traffic was a good movie. I don't think it's justified in Black Hawk down, and I don't think making of that movie itself was justified at all. It was a garbage of a movie in every way. bad acting, inaccurate story ( yes, it's based on a true story, but there is nothing true about this movie other than a chopper was shot down somewhere over there, badly overdone with color masturbation as well.

Ridley Scott had some good movies, one of which includes a movie from my top 5 all time favorites, but this was garbage you'd expect from Michael Bay.

Did you see it in a theater or on DVD?

Some movies work only on the big screen, some only on a TV screen.

I have seen several recent Hollywood movies with special effects that look OK in a theater but look completely fake when watched on a small screen.

Additionally, there are very few TVs that are properly set up, so it is really iffy to pass final judgment based on watching a consumer TV (compared to say a same size post house monitor that is calibrated three times daily, or a big theater screen).

And I'm grateful to live in a city with some of the best picture quality and sound quality movie theaters in the world. If any top theater here gets sloppy (it's happened a few times), the owner gets shamed by industry people immediately, and it's even happened that Hollywood sent their own experts over to help get everything done right.

Th article is misleading. It's the film's DP, Slawomir Idziak, who came up with the colors. I'm pretty sure the DP was hired because Scott needed someone who's good with monochromatic images -- in this case yellow desert and Idziak did "Double Life of Veronique" (where he uses similar pallet of yellows and sometimes strong greens). Then the choice to shoot green at night was because that's how night is perceived by soldiers (because of night visions goggles).