Thursday, July 13, 2006
Action Crap
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, while actually taking money out of your pocket as you read this, is great fun, but it does have many of the flaws that plague modern blockbuster entertainment. The one that hacked me off the most and, by extraordinary coincidence, the one I am writing this article about, is its use of Action Crap.
These are the shots of general mayhem in an action scene when extras run about and get shot, impaled, defenestrated and immolated. They serve no narrative purpose other than to say 'Attack is happening!', 'OMG!' and 'Look at how big our budget is!'. Crucially, if you removed the Action Crap, the film would play exactly the same, as these shots do not develop the story, resolve any conflicts or even have any of the main characters in them. They are there to spice up the scenes, bulk up the action, and to add a bit of spectacle and good old-fashioned senseless violence, not that there's anything wrong with that in itself.
The problem is that action scenes should be the parts where the audience is most keenly sensitive to the fates of the characters, as these are the parts where the conflict comes to a head and, on a base level, where these people who you care about are in the most danger and yet, by stuffing them up with Action Crap, the film-makers distance the audience from that narrative pulse, turning the scene from being breathlessly exciting to merely gawpingly spectacular.
The Action Crap has a long history. The stunt shot has always been around. The stunt man has been falling out of windows, getting dragged behind horses and running around on fire since the beginning of film. The stunt man is reported as 'being a bit tired now'. Action Crap is great fun when used correctly. The problem has come in the modern age of blockbuster entertainment, of b-movies being given a-movie budgets, digital technology allowing endless and immense scale, and of Steven Spielberg. There are no straight lines in history, especially movie history, but I'm going to start with Saving Private Ryan.
Private Ryan sparked the trend for longer and longer battle scenes after its mostly awesome and much ballyhooed opening 25 minutes of bits of Americans. Jerry Bruckheimer seemed very proud to tell us that Black Hawk Down's 'action scene' lasted over 90 minutes. Private Ryan's battle was also notable for deliberately not being narrative, but experiential - doing away with plot and character almost altogether in favour of a disorienting yet immersive account of what it would be like to be there. It's not just an action scene, you see, and the violence is not gratuitous - this style informs us that this is history, this is important and this is about the event, not just the pretty stars in the foreground. Since then we have had lots and lots of gruesome historical battles - see Troy, Alexander, et al.
This all leads up to the kraken fight where we have several seperate attacks in a row, with many, many lovingly detailed shots of the kraken killing random pirates while the leads run about in between. Why have one shot of a tentacle whipping someone overboard when you can have several dozen? It will prove that the battle is serious! It will make the climax epic! It will show that we have more money than anyone else!
The result is that the scene becomes choppy and difficult to follow as the momentum is constantly upset by these narratively non-existant shots. You will either get terribly annoyed by the scene as you impatiently wait for the hero to get back on screen or it will get boring, as you start to lose track of what is and is not narratively important, and the scene simply becomes a blur.
During the editing of The Two Towers, Peter Jackson and his collaborators realised that if the action moved away from a hero character for more than about 3 shots, the battle became boring, so they kept cutting it down and cutting away to Frodo or the Ents. I remember reading about these cut-aways and cut-downs with mounting horror in the months before the release. I wanted 45 minutes of uninterrupted carnage. I can only thank the god of movies (hey Stan!) that Peter Jackson was a much better film-maker than I was back then. I'm catching up though.
A good use of Action Crap, to use an example I've seen recently, is From Dusk Till Dawn - when the film goes entirely apeshit with the vampires. There is a good thirty seconds of nothing but wide-shot Action Crap and the disorienting effect of having no narrative to follow adds to the effect that all expectations given by the first half of the movie are now entirely out of the window. And that there's vampires.
Equally there's a shot in Godfather 2 when the gang war finally erupts and the mobsters spill out onto a New York street shooting indiscrimintaley. It is only one shot and lasts only a few seconds, and it perfectly demonstrates to the audience that the situation has now grown out of control.
There have, of course, always been crappy action movies and yes, I grew up watching Schwarzenegger films, but I do believe the problem has been getting worse recently. The escalation in budgets and technological facility is fueling a cock-waving arms-race of increasingly bloated movies filled with increasingly boring Action Crap. The idea that action scenes are there to put your characters in danger is getting lost, replaced with the idea that characters are there to get you to the next action scene. Mind you, calls for a return to character always sound so fucking prissy, so I'm going to resort to insults:
Sweety, who cares how big it is if your stomach is blocking the view?
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Liked the article, and not just because I agree with you.
I would say, however, you could trace the modern version of this trend back to Braveheart's setpieces.
I think the subsequent historical/massive battles/lots of violence movies reference the opening battle of Private Ryan far more directly. That film, linked with the technology of Phantom Menace and the success of Gladiator is what brought all this about.
Maybe Gladiator was an attempt to make a post-Braveheart historical epic and it just took a few years to get made, but i don't recall braveheart sparking lots of epics. I remember asteroids, volcanoes and lots of cgi monsters aping Jurassic Park.
That said, i have never been able to get the energy to actually watch braveheart since its first release. I wonder if its any good?
Maybe its place in history is the first signs of gibson's violent mania and fucking celtic music signifying epic tragedy - which morphed into that chanting wailing lady we're sick of today.
It may not have sparked it, but it was certainly used as the primary reference tool on this epics you're discussing, including LOTR.
It inspired Keira Knightly's make-up in King Arthur, I suppose.
You are like.. anti-joy.
That's our Gusset!
*laugh track*
Its called film criticism, bradley.
You really need to watch Braveheart again. Or at least the battle scenes. And that part where he clobbers the guy with that giant hammer, cause that's fuckin' wicked.
And the bit where he kills the gay? Can I watch that too?
And cheer like the audience did!