Action Replay

Why Have Action Films Lost Confidence in ACTION?

By A.J. Detisch

I’ve read that nostalgia runs in cycles, usually twenty years, where age groups will bring back into relevance those immortal, fuzzy things from their childhood's cultures.

I'm waiting for that to kick in with my generation of action film directors. I don’t like the direction action movies have been taken because they just don't seem as glorious anymore. As I sit through movies like Doug Liman’s The Bourne Identity or Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, I find myself wondering if I had just watched an action film at all. Don’t get me wrong, Bourne’s is enjoyable, but there was something about the action that made it seem as though Liman was trying to hide the fact that he made an action movie at all.



Those who agree might say it is the way in which the film was cut. The editing rhythms in Bourne try to keep pace with the slick fight choreography- the jabs, kicks, punches. If you have a minute, check out the film’s first fight scene: Let’s analyze:

1. The scene starts out with shaky, uncertain handheld camera. Jason and Marie exchange glances and a man DIVES through the window – it’s a gunman.
2. Jason KICKS the gunman’s feet from under him and thrusts his arm up to offset the bullets flying out of his gun.
3. They wrestle around a little bit, they cut back generously to Marie who’s scared, and Jason wrestles the gun out of his hand. The shot lingers on the gun and then-
4. The fight breaks out.
5. Cuts are sporatic (milliseconds long), the two fight. The gunman flicks out a concealed knife.

Keep in mind, Liman OPENLY is loose with story boards and sometimes shoots on the fly.

At this point in the scene I scratched my head and thought “is it the editing rhythms that are throwing it off, or is it the way Liman does coverage in general? I noticed that in this fight scene, Liman implements a highly inductive method of showing close ups of exactly what is necessary to move on to the next shot. We see the knife, Marie screams, they go back at it. Before this, at fifty seconds into the clip, a low angle shows Jason KICK at the gunman, but the audience has NO IDEA whether or not he actually kicks him, we just assume he did because of the sound effect.

To me, this is not action in the action film sense of the word. In reaction, I always feel very nostalgic for the way the action directors of my childhood did action coverage. What would James Cameron have done with this scene, or John McTierrnan? Neither have been very prolific in the 2000’s and it is going to be fascinating to see how Cameron’s Avatar is going to handle its action sequences in the post-Bourne era. I regard Terminator 2 and True Lies to be very satisfying action films because you see the action play out; every blow dealt is seen.

Take this classic scene from True Lies (“the toilet shootout”). The scene is fluid -- the cameras are fluid, probably on a crane or GOOD steadicam, confidently floating around the action. The cuts are quick, but the action is never “avoided.” When I say avoided, I mean Cameron keep his cuts in the same general spatial area (he’s not cutting back and forth from wide angle to close up) to keep it feeling like a long take, even though it’s far from it.

I would argue this allows the viewer to enjoy the action more because the coverage keeps things connected. At the 38 second marker, Arnie kicks the handgun and the viewer can watch it glide down the wet floor. Then it cuts to a minimally wider angle to see the fight continue. I would assume someone like Liman or Paul Greengrass would do this inductively, with a close up of the gun that gets kicked away, and then instantly back into a wider angle of the fighting, breaking the spatial continuity of the action completely.

It feels like an “economy of action” is a tool being wielded by modern action directors, most probably to keep their stories moving. This attitude, however, labels long action sequences (which are nuanced and take their time) as excess. I feel that is what these scenes are subconsciously saying.

Perfect example: Christopher Nolan’s Batman films. The first film clocks in at two hours and fifteen minutes, the second over two and a half hours. The scripts are bursting at the seams with plot and action. How did Nolan handle this? He TRIMMED DOWN THE ACTION SEQUENCES.

Let’s compare the Batman’s infiltration of the Ritz from Batman Forever to the Boss Maroni takedown scene from The Dark Knight. In Forever Batman jumps through the glass roof into a mini pool area, then jumps from it again to take down a slew of henchmen. The scene has a sprawling effect, moving from the pool to the floor, ending up in an underground trap Two Face set up.

In The Dark Knight, a significantly longer movie, the Maroni takedown is quick. Maroni (Eric Roberts) notices him, Batman punches a few guards, and then interrogates him. This was a perfect set-up for an action scene-- balconies, strobe lights, henchmen-- and even though I enjoyed the scene, I missed that “sprawling” effect.

The whole Batman film franchise has successfully transcended the superhero genre and is seen by most critics as a serious crime-drama. The cost of this, unfortunately, meant cutting any action that wasn’t relevant to the plot. The two and a half hours moved quickly, but I sure did miss those henchmen takedowns.

Il Deserto Rosso (1964)

Michelangelo Antonioni's "alienation Trilogy" of "L'Avventura," "La Notte" and "L'Eclisse" didn't seem to exhaust his artistic flair for questioning humanity's relationship to its increasingly mechanized world. He followed the trilogy with "Il Deserto Rosso" ("Red Desert") a work that serves as both a companion piece to it and a bridge connecting it to his later, more detailed and less abstract English-language films. With the introduction of color to his advantage, he reworks the same themes of the "alienation trilogy" but enhances them with a stylized color palette of greys, reds, greens and browns. It makes for a pristine and unforgettable visual experience that takes Antonioni's body of work into a fascinating new direction.

The opening credit sequence establishes two of the most prevalent and effective motifs explored in "Il Deserto Rosso": the manipulation of focus and sound. First is a single shot of a treeline, which is set against a gray sky, completely out of focus. The shot pans over to a power plant, clouded in smoke, then cuts to an assemblage of ugly exterior shots to the point where one hopes the shots stay out of focus. Throughout the sequence Antonioni uses a droning soundscape of industrial noises which are blended with a haunting female voice, strangely provoking either lament or hope.

A few loud bursts of fire shooting from a rig announce the story's beginning. The lovely Monica Vitti is once again Antionioni's socially disconnected protagonist, this time Giuliana, who is introduced guiding her young son amongst the backdrop of a worker's strike at the plant. Her behavior instantly seems odd as she approaches a man and asks to buy his sandwich, which he is in the process of eating. She seems desperate and confused, but her well-groomed beauty and opulent, green pea coat show her obvious wealth.



One learns through dialogue that she is a psychologically troubled woman whose everyday consciousness has become seriously effected by a traumatic car accident. Despite being treated in a psychiatric hospital, she is far from recovered - seen through her constantly jittery and disoriented behavior. She eventually meets with her husband Ugo, who has either a striking lack of sympathy for his wife's condition or a complete ignorance of the existential angst that it has led her to.

Afraid to be alone, she confides in his partner Corrado (Richard Harris) instead. He's a warmer man, but still very much a product of his endlessly busy environment. As she joins him on a trip to recruit workers for a project overseas, she sees that he is trapped in a meaningless cycle of work. This cycle is externalized in a conversation Corrado has with one of the potential workers' wives, who asserts that he will have trouble recruiting her husband because the separation between them would be too troubling. Such a separation seems to be at the core of each of the characters' wounds, and the relationship Giuliana forms with Corrado is as cyclical as anything else within the film's world.

The film breaks free of its stylistic and thematic limbo in only one scene, when Giuliana tells her son a story to comfort him when he is apparently suffering from an apparent neurological problem. The story is about a young girl on a deserted beach who seeks isolation, until she is disturbed by ships approaching the shore in the distance. Antonioni recreates the tale, allowing his color palette to break down, contrasting Giuliana's reality with a varying amount of shimmering color. The scene is a counterpoint to the rest of the film, ironically using the device of storytelling to "escape" the reality created on screen.

"Red Desert" is an uncomfortable movie to say the least. It subjects the viewer to such dreadful, existential coldness which is more unrelenting than any of Antonioni's previous works. There is a constant onslaught of eerie, disquieting sound design creeping throughout the scenes slowly destroying objectivity. The surreal ugliness of the primary color pallete is equally effective in creating this atmosphere. Antonioni uses these objective elements to completely convey Giuliana's psychological torment and the effect is undeniably haunting.