viz.

Image Credit: Prometheus (2012)

Hollywood, you are going about action movies all wrong, then, because you have taken for granted what is the opposite of the actual case. You believe we viewers take pleasure from grandiosity of visual effect, but in fact your viewers are suffering from a spiritual condition of nullity brought on by over-exposure to the visually incomprehensible. How to make us feel anything: that is your challenge! Two recent treatments of the action movie hero provide a neat case in point and will serve for a conclusion to these remarks on the importance of psychological realism to compelling action cinema.

The image below--taken from Timur Bekmambetov’s Wanted (2008)--shows assassin Fox (Angelina Jolie) wielding a large-caliber handgun in one hand, an Uzi in the other, reclining on the hood of a hot red Dodge Viper, presumably holding herself on to the speeding car by virtue of her imponderable leg strength.

Image Credit: Wanted (2008)

If you have read my last two posts, you will not be surprised to learn that I consider this image an excellent example of all that is wrong with action cinema. It goes without saying that it does not represent a physical possibility. All the elements of this scene have been selected for the way they look on the big screen; none of them have been criticized from the perspective of psychological realism. Eminently consumable, it takes its place in the vault of one’s imagination next to countless like it and is immediately forgotten about. Incidentally, Wanted imagines a world where one can bend the trajectory of bullets by waving the gun while you shoot it: as with the image, so with the movie as a whole.

Now let’s conclude by looking at a far better because psycho-realistic depiction of the action movie hero in scientist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) of Ridley Scott’s 2012 Prometheus. In the shot which heads up this post, Shaw is using a semi-automated technology for surgery to manually remove from herself the growing fetus of an alien species. The fanciful elements of this scenario are obvious, but it is treated with great psychological realism. One cringes to watch it. Scott’s only mistake is to have Shaw running about the ship after completing the surgery. Shaw, up to this point, is a believably strong person. Had she collapsed after the surgery from feelings of exhaustion, over-strain, betrayal, sorrow, and fear--not to mention blood loss--her character would have been more relatable and the plot would have benefitted as well. (For instance, the viewer might “pass out” with Shaw only to reawaken in a ship on red alert, with no crew around and possibly an alien intruder on board. It is vulnerability, remember, which lends to action cinema the power to compel emotional response. As it is in the movie, the viewer gets too omniscient a viewpoint to be very apprehensive, and Shaw is going on a mission almost immediately after suturing her lower abdomen.)

As I have argued, it is that with which we are close­­ to which we are able to respond emotionally. The two arrows of choice in the quiver of action filmmakers should be the close-up and the wide angle; the first to capture the knowing look, the quivering flesh. The other because one only dares look out of the corner of one’s eye at a sight that one somehow knows to be too large to comprehend. The Sublime, as the Romantics called it, must be treated tangentially, and in fact, disappears the moment one tries to get a direct view of it.

Image Credit: Prometheus (2012)

Scott understands this remarkably well in this shot, where he produces a psychologically fraught moment by combining a close-up--Shaw’s strong but exhausted and vulnerable person--with a wide-angle--an unknown, armored, large bipedal coming round the corner.

Keep our eyes, Hollywood, on what is at our level, and only gesture towards what we know is there all the time, almost as if it were looking down at us: the “general and universal physical fear” of which Faulkner spoke, “so long sustained by now that we can even bear it.” Adopt psychological realism and you will have made gripping action cinema.