Poster trend: nothing illustrates a fractured psyche like a dissolve!

From the guys who brought you unnecessary helicopters, unnecessary sparks, unnecessary motion blur, unnecessary little people, unnecessary diagonal and unnecessary everything else comes the latest poster trend: unnecessary dissolves!

It must be hard being a poster designer in the age of Photoshop, when every two-bit hack with a new plug-in is capable of churning out a one-sheet. You've been given your key art of your movie's lead characters - usually featuring the heads and bodies of two completely different people - and you now have to make the movie marketable with graphics. Crop this... here? Add layer effects... there, I guess? Oh fuck it, let's just see how everyone else does it. Will this do?



Take this picture from series of character posters for Insurgent, out this week. How best to symbolise the movie's fractured society than by literally fracturing the characters? It'd be a clever gimmick... if it hadn't already been done by every other major blockbuster over the last few years.




See? Dracula Untold is dissolving into bats because he himself is also some bats. That's just as clever.




It's not just sci-fi and horror that makes use of this trend. Here we can see Helen Mirren's Woman In Gold dissolving into flecks of... gold lamé, I guess? This poster makes it look like Helen Mirren plays a Terminator. (Note to self: write movie in which Helen Mirren plays a Terminator).




Look out, Laurence Fishburne or Samuel L Jackson! You're being disseminated! If your movie's character isn't made out of gold or bats, you can still have them dissolve... into information. Because what are we made of if not information? This is an accurate representation of how the human body's data retention works, and why we always forget things during windy weather. (I have not seen this film, maybe he is some bats.)




Behold: Johnny Depp is transcending into computer data before our very eyes, and also into mediocrity before our very eyes! All of these shards of cyber-glass are being hoovered into a hard drive where they'll later be reassembled in a 3D black and green wireframe model, symbolising Johnny Depp's reboot as The Lawnmower Man 2.0. Computers!




Wolverine might have an excuse here, actually. Either he's literally dissolving because his regenerative skills would allow it, or he's been made so angry he straight up punted an Easter Egg in the air and headbutted the shit out of it in a fit of rage. Grrrr!




Here you can see Third Person's ingénue Olivia Wilde dissolving into the bullshit script the movie was made from. She's literally guffing words out of her arsehole. Much like Paul Haggis did when he wrote it.




Looper opted for a more subtle dissolve, in which the dissemination of the characters symbolises, I don't know, the sands of fucking time or something. All I know is that it looks like Bruce Willis is about to sneeze.




Total Recall: in which Colin Farrell is made of squares but he can't remember why he's made of squares, because his squares keep falling off. This is how memories work in the future, so get used to it, squares.




I have not seen this movie so I do not know why this person is dissolving but I'm pretty sure he told some lies because his pants are on fire and let's just move on to the next one and pretend this never happened.




To be fair to The Darkest Hour, from what I can remember about this movie, what you see is a literal representation of what the invisible lightning monster does to its victims. The fact I can even remember it features an invisible lightning monster is quite impressive, I feel.




Here we see Maze Runner star Dylan O'Brien dissolving into plants or moss or whatever. He sort of looks like one of those unfortunate dudes who is just a torso that has to travel round on a skateboard, but after you left him in your shed for a year.




If I watch this movie and discover that not one character literally bursts, I will lose my shit.




The shattered glass surrounding Bruce Willis on this Die Hard collection DVD cover is presumably to distract from his fucking massive weird salad fingers wrapped around that gun.




Yes, yes. Very clever Batman. We're all super impressed. Just wait until Gotham town hall gets wind of the fact you've destroyed the city's skyline to make a logo of yourself. And that's before they find out what you did to their bridge.