The Problem with Action: Why Explosions & Epic Battles Are Just Kind Of...Eh
You've got a monster the size of a skyscraper wreaking havoc upon a big city with F-16s firing missiles at it -- missing -- leaving everything within a two mile radius in a pile of smoking rubble. So what?
Action films are specifically designed to get your heart pumping, however it seems that, as of late, they fail in a big, big way. If you've realized that these flicks have left you a little -- bored -- there's a reason for it.
It seems as though many of today's assembly line action films are a lot like the destruction they so brazenly depict up on the big screen: they're senseless. They make monsters and villains bigger, badder, more cataclysmic because -- "it's more epic." They show explosions and car chases for the sake of showing them. It's chaos for the sake of chaos.
We say it all the time here at NFS, story is supreme. If whatever's up on screen isn't serving the story, be it an action sequence, an edit, or a line of dialog, then it has no reason to exist. It's superfluous. It's unnecessary. And good cinema has always trimmed the fat, so to speak, letting the excess fall to the cutting room floor.
This doesn't mean that action films have to tone down the action, necessarily. It just means that it all needs a few things: a narrative purpose, coherence, and good cinematic practice. The video explains a few ways to make your action sequences better cinematically by "showing rather implying", like capturing the action in wide shots, not relying solely on rapid editing to hide poor choreography, and giving you audience a clear sense of space. However, the big message from the video is this: your action scenes must have emotional arcs.
They explain it like this. Though action films contain emotional character development scenes, they often don't mix them with the action scenes. To put it more clearly, action scenes, even if it's a grand, explosive spectacle, would be so much more powerful to the story if they also contained a part of the overall character arc. Because over the top chaos, extravagant destruction, and senseless action lacks the one thing that really drives us to the movie theater in the first place: something to connect to emotionally.
Source: samandniko
