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Image Credit: J.R. Eyerman

Part I: Analysis of the Problem

What ails action cinema? Why, it is Hollywood’s obsession with visual effect, which derives from a misunderstanding about how emotion is connected to looking.

Hollywood has put all of its eggs into the basket of “scopophilia,” Freud’s term for the pleasure a person obtains from looking. Hollywood’s action movie-makers, in particular, aim to visually stun.

South Park - Michael Bay on Pinkbike

Courtesy South Park: Season 11: Episode 10 "Imaginationland" and Pinkbike.com

The problem with aiming to visually stun is that the price of its success quickly inflates. Like a drug, that which visually arrests fails to satisfy a second time. Film-makers must needs ratchet up the visuals, and indeed the last half-century of action cinema attests to a breakneck race to feed the addiction. Explosions, pictures of Earth from space, drooling monsters, time-lapse: the quiver of visual technique bursts at the seams, and yet one begins to feel that none of the arrows aims true.

Image Credit: Deep Impact (1998)

What is worse, there is no longer anywhere left to go. 3D held our attention for a moment, no doubt, but as only a technological solution, it fails to address the real problem. We are bored with action cinema. All the visuals in the world no longer do anything for us. We have seen enough!

 Image Credit: Avatar (2009)

The real question -- and the one I am making a plea to Hollywood to reconsider -- is, What makes a sight arresting to a person? What visual information is capable of starting up in our bodies a feeling? Hollywood’s answer has been, for the most part, that which is big gets a response. The bigger the better. Their mistake has been to disregard how little we viewers are. In a word, the movies have gone big without retaining anything small, with the result that we do not really sense the bigness of even the biggest visual effects.

Add Action FX to your iPhone video; Image Credit: Bad Robot Interactive

This brings us, Hollywood, to the one and only step necessary to reinvigorate the action genre: adopt realism!

Action cinema cannot afford to disregard the claims of realism. What makes a situation exciting, gripping, scary, intense is the possibility that bad things could very easily happen to a person. American action cinema is filled with super-people, but people are really rather clumsy and ineffectual. When situations get tight, it’s scary because chance plays such an indomitable role in deciding the issue. There is only so much that a person is capable of. The most highly trained people who deal with “action” scenarios in real life will be the first to tell you that there is no such thing as super. There is only fortunate. One gives oneself the best chances by being disciplined and knowledgeable, and it can still very easily go terribly wrong.

Great action narrative recognizes the frailty and ineffectuality of human beings. What realism will do to make for arresting visuals is to scale them, an indispensable technique for the eliciting of an emotional response.

Image Credit: The Walking Dead (2010)

It is the vulnerability of the man on the horse in this screen shot from the popular AMC series The Walking Dead that scales for the viewer the magnitude of the cataclysm. Psychological realism is the reason for arresting visual effect.

Tune in next week for: An Objection is Entertained