Why Are So Many Modern Action Movies Terrible?

Salon writes Why are so many modern action movies terrible? "A video essay blasts shaky camerawork and fast cutting, and urges filmmakers to get back to basics."

"Written and edited by a young German film student named Matthias Stork, the piece gathers together a lot of the complaints that I've heard and read about contemporary action films into a sort of manifesto. The piece debuted earlier this week at Press Play, a video essay-driven blog that I founded. Stork created it as way to explain how action film style has changed from the more stately type seen in such films as "Bullitt," "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "Die Hard" into something much faster, more frenetic and -- Stork believes -- sloppier and stupider."

I thought the 20 minutes gave lots of good examples and I mostly agreed with it, with some differences. Michael Bay is certainly an example of crap action. Cloverfield pissed the shit of me. Not only did I hate the camerawork, I hated the characters and at the 8 minute mark (I checked) I wanted them all to die. I think this started with the Blair Witch Project and am surprised he didn't mention it.

I'm mostly ok with the Bourne films using this technique. I liked the films, could mostly follow what was going on and got a sense of the freneticism of the fights. I liked Casino Royale too. I thought Quantum of Solace went too far. He shows the opening car chase and I really hated that. There's a left turn out of nowhere that lets Bond escape a traffic jam. If he had enough time to see it and make the turn, I should have had the same.

He cites Inception as a bad example and I don't agree. I could mostly follow the action, but the point of the film was to be difficult to keep up, to get you into a dream state. Nolan I think walked the line perfectly. I think some scenes in his Batman films worked and some didn't. I couldn't follow the car chase in The Dark Knight the first time I saw it, but had a pretty easy time the second.

I agree with him that The Hurt Locker used it to good effect. I think he cited Black Hawk Down as a bad example, but I think it and Full Metal Jacket are perhaps the two best examples of orienting an audience with a space that's several square blocks large. I liked it in United 93 too.

I also completely agree that more films like Ronin should be made. It's amazing and under-recognized.

I think the essay could have done better on how technology shaped some of these technique. In the early days cameras couldn't move and a editing wasn't sophisticated enough to accomplish this stuff. Also, for a lot of action, the people were actually doing the crazy stunts the films suggested. Cuts were usually used to trick the audience when they weren't. He mentioned Singing in the Rain, but didn't mention explicitly how Gene Kelly didn't let his numbers be edited to show that he really was doing all the moves.

As cameras became more portable and people were more accustomed to the language of film, directors had more choices to exploit to show the action and excite the audience. Look at the evolution of the Bond films on how action sequences got less and less realistic. The sixties were using sped up film to convey excitement and it looks pretty weak now. The seventies were stretching just beyond the possible. Live and Let Die had a world record car jump but it wouldn't have worked in a real chase. The opening ski chase in The Spy Who Loved Me is great, but at each edit the villains get further away from where they were a moment before. Then it just got dumber and dumber. I think it was in the late nineties when Bond jumped out a window, grabbed the cord from the blinds and they somehow became three stories long. To do this you need stupid camera tricks, because if the camera lingers too long, you realize how dumb it is.

But what he doesn't address is that audiences have learned to read films differently over the decades. I doubt an audience from the 1910s could follow the action in Ronin. He cites trailers and music videos as influences but left out video games. I think if you're and avid first-person shooter player (I'm not) you have a much easier time following a Bourne film. There's something to be said for being able to follow the action, and I certainly prefer that; but a month ago I blogged about Set Design Impossibilities in The Shining. There's sometimes something to be said for movie magic affecting an audience rather than just documenting a stunt.