I honestly think that truly great action choreography is the greatest thing in all cinema. There is nothing better in movies than a really intense, brutal and stylish action scene. Whether it's fist fights, car chases or epic battles, that's where the basic thrills of cinema lie.
And after more than a century of terrific actions scenes, with breathtakingly dangerous stunts and propulsive narratives, there are still amazing action films being shot every year, and it's starting to look like there really isn't any limit to what you can do with the human body for the art of cinema. (Tom Cruise might find it for us, one day.)
But for all that, there are also worrying amounts of my least favourite type of action, and that's a sequence where main characters are running away from a large amount of falling digital debris or massive CGI monsters on the rampage.
When the characters aren't engaging with the action, and just madly running through an impossible barrage, only surviving through sheer luck rather than any agency of their own.
So many big blockbusters resort to this mad scramble and they all look the same, full of close calls and near-misses. And even when these scenes have no weight or gravity to them, so many big films fall into their influence.
These scenes are part of the deafening noise of the Transformers series, and you expect that kind of thing from Michael Bay, but even something like the second chapter of Stephen King's It really lost its cool when the creepy clown turned into a giant spider monster that runs around after the heroes scrambling for cover.
These scenes always look very expensive and time-consuming, and nearly every film could do without them. They sometimes look impressive, but they're always running in the same spot.
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