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Aug. 14th, 2013 12:09 pmThis is a post about action movies.
So last week I saw Red 2, which was a perfectly enjoyable movie as action movies go; I mean, I'm never going to complain about watching Helen Mirren saunter around being THE MOST fabulous spy because that is basically candy for my brain and eyes.
But I did spend a lot of that movie thinking: "Gosh, there are a lot of random people killed in this movie. Like, a LOT of dead people that nobody cares about, and that we, the audience are not really expected to care about. Like, wow, A LOT A LOT."
I had a conversation about this with my friends afterwards, and their consensus was pretty much, "Well, yes, and not that it's not a problem, but that's the genre; that's what action movies DO, they generate a lot of bodies for the factor of cool."
And I feel like this isn't necessarily true, but I also haven't seen enough pure action movies to generate a ton of counter-examples. The best one I can think of is a bit from Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which is not an action movie but a television show, and one that in many ways is subverting a lot of the tropes of the genre it grows out of. So in T:SCC there is an episode in which Catherine Weaver, Badass Terminator, basically just wanders through a building killing everyone in sight with her shiny metal Terminator arms. It's a very, very action-tastic sequence, and it is, let's be real, a pretty cool sequence. And then comes the next episode: as the director says, "if you enjoy watching Weaver slaughter thirty people in one episode you're obligated to go to their funeral in the next."
So that's stuck with me. And I sort of feel that's more how things should be; that the death even of a bunch of extras is something that one ought to care about, at least a little.
Anyway, I've been thinking about it and now I'm tossing the question back out to you guys: what do you think? Is a high body count and a low consequence factor just inherently part and parcel of the action movie experience? Is it something that bothers you, or depending on circumstance, or not at all?
So last week I saw Red 2, which was a perfectly enjoyable movie as action movies go; I mean, I'm never going to complain about watching Helen Mirren saunter around being THE MOST fabulous spy because that is basically candy for my brain and eyes.
But I did spend a lot of that movie thinking: "Gosh, there are a lot of random people killed in this movie. Like, a LOT of dead people that nobody cares about, and that we, the audience are not really expected to care about. Like, wow, A LOT A LOT."
I had a conversation about this with my friends afterwards, and their consensus was pretty much, "Well, yes, and not that it's not a problem, but that's the genre; that's what action movies DO, they generate a lot of bodies for the factor of cool."
And I feel like this isn't necessarily true, but I also haven't seen enough pure action movies to generate a ton of counter-examples. The best one I can think of is a bit from Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which is not an action movie but a television show, and one that in many ways is subverting a lot of the tropes of the genre it grows out of. So in T:SCC there is an episode in which Catherine Weaver, Badass Terminator, basically just wanders through a building killing everyone in sight with her shiny metal Terminator arms. It's a very, very action-tastic sequence, and it is, let's be real, a pretty cool sequence. And then comes the next episode: as the director says, "if you enjoy watching Weaver slaughter thirty people in one episode you're obligated to go to their funeral in the next."
So that's stuck with me. And I sort of feel that's more how things should be; that the death even of a bunch of extras is something that one ought to care about, at least a little.
Anyway, I've been thinking about it and now I'm tossing the question back out to you guys: what do you think? Is a high body count and a low consequence factor just inherently part and parcel of the action movie experience? Is it something that bothers you, or depending on circumstance, or not at all?
