5 minutes
action!
Abdullah Al Qamzi
Abdulla.AlQamzi@emaratalyoum.com
August 29, 2021
Why are action movies so popular?
Simply because they are the only films that do not make us bored, part of our resort to entertainment, eliminating boredom, and action films specifically made to give the viewer an unusual entertainment that he does not find in his life.
Action films are the easiest option for any film producer, and the most guarantee of success. These films require two important factors: a high budget, a well-known movie star, in the role of the hero or the villain, and it does not matter if one is more famous than the other, or two known stars in the face of a villain.
High budget action movies need to spend on chases and explosions, smashing buildings and cars and blowing up planes, all of which require expert explosives or dazzling special effects.
The audience watches action movies because they are looking for excitement and exaggeration. You and I do not watch an action movie because we seek realism, for example. Reality is our boring life, and we want something greater than it, something that does not exist in our current life, something that breaks the monotony of the boring routine and accept it no matter how exaggerated it is. If action cinema was realistic, it would not find an audience.
The most famous example of the lack of realism is Rambo's victory with his bare chest over the Vietnamese, despite Washington's inability to win that war, which made the character very popular among the American public, because it created a parallel fantasy reality.
Another example, Arnold Schwarzenegger, with his bare chest also overcome the alien creature in "Predator", which takes the jungle setting for its events, to remind the audience that the American triumphs in the jungle, and these films constituted a phenomenon called in Hollywood: the reconciliation with the Vietnam complex.
The features of this cinema include: slowing down the movement in the shot, such as the hero jumping from a plane or ship, or the villain falling from a tower or helicopter, and we see the shot in slow motion to dramatize the situation (the most brilliant of which was employed by John McTiernan in Die Hard), and bringing the camera closer to the action to immerse the scenes in Action Joe (most brilliantly employed by Paul Greengrass in the Jason Bourne series).
Or placing the camera in the face of the character to monitor his reaction to the action and give the shot a human dimension (the most skillful one employed by the legend Steven Spielberg), and sequential montage to help the viewer understand the path of fast movement, relative to the geography of the place in which the shot takes place, the most talented one employed by the montage technician, Evan Schiff, with director Chad Stahelsky, on the John Wick series.
As it happens in crime movies, action cinema gives us needed low doses of the hormone adrenaline, which keeps your mind awake while watching in a temporary state of excitement that you don't want to end, and makes you sit on the edge of your seat to see what happens in the end.
Attitude
The famous American action series “24” created a phenomenon that did not occur in the history of cinema or television. For the first time, viewers were eagerly waiting for advertisements to catch their breath after the action and suspense clips that filled its episodes in an unprecedented way.
The series created another phenomenon. When its episodes were released on DVD, in the first decade of the new millennium, viewers became addicted to it and consumed it in a row, which generated the binge watch phenomenon associated with addiction to action, before it moved to other types of series.
Abdulla.AlQamzi@emaratalyoum.com
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Abdulla.AlQamzi@emaratalyoum.com