(no subject)

[skygiants]

This 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?

Comments

[skygiants]

Hah, man, I didn't see White House Down but I transcribed some stuff about it and all I remember thinking about that movie was "Roland Emmerich is blowing up the White House AGAIN?!" I didn't even realize there was another one that came out this year!

But yeah, word, on all the destruction of major city buildings -- and maybe this comes from living in a city, and having a constant sense of how much damage it really does. Skyscrapers are REALLY NOT THAT DURABLE. And a LOT of people use those things!

[sylleptic]

I actually really liked White House Down! I didn't expect to, since the other one came out first and was pretty terrible. But yeah, that one's a fun movie and non-toxic politically, which is rare and delightful.

I wonder if the skyscraper reaction is also a 9/11 thing? Like, the Chitauri whale-ship wings the skyscrapers in Avengers and I expect them to kind of implode and fall, because that's my real-world visual reference for what happens when something hits a skyscraper. It would actually be really interesting to look at what kind of city-destruction happens in movies and whether it's changed over time or between genres or stuff like that. Thought-provoking!

[skygiants]

A friend of mine actually has this whole theory about Iron Man 3 as extended reference to post 9/11 national trauma - i.e. "what happened in New York" - which seems pretty plausible to me.

It's interesting, I feel like there was a time right after 9/11 when tearing down skyscrapers in action movies was Too Close and Not Okay, and now suddenly we're tearing them down bigger and boomier than ever.