Roleplaying
April 10th 2003 -
Roleplaying
Went out to Owen’s place for RP last night. He lives in French’s Forest, just bought a house for an absurdly large amount of money. It’s enormous. Four bedrooms, a swimming pool, double garage, and a half-dozen rooms downstairs that are bare brick and dirt on the ground. One of the rooms has been done up, presumably a long time ago because its colour scheme is brown and yellow. Wood panelling, yellow carpet, copper light fixtures. A bar along one side next to the stairs. Welcome to the Pad.
Action!
I get periodically irritated when films put their protagonists in absurd amounts of peril, through which they survive due to arbitarily astonishing luck. For example: in Lilo & Stitch, there’s a big air-borne chase in which characters seemed to periodically fall off one airplane/flying-saucer, only to land on another one. The factory floor scene in Star Wars Episode 2, in which our heroes avoid being stamped into oblivion again and again, until it becomes numbing. Any number of James Bond films where the bad guys have machine guns.
The scenes of travelling-very-fast. Rocks, avalanches, explosions, bullets, great big shards of metal falling mere centimetres behind.
Impromptu surfing using found objects.
Such scenes are intended to be exciting but the luck involved is so arbitary, the level of skill of the protagonist so irrelevent, that I become bored. I instinctively recoiled from seeing “Ice Age” after seeing the ad showing a scene in which the characters sliding down ice-chasm-tubes. I had the feeling that it would attempt comedy and excitement and kinetic energy and be, y’know, hip, and probably last a good ten minutes. All true. The film as a whole was alright, but the action scenes were a chore.
I kinda enjoy analysing why many action scenes are so poor. Rapid and incoherent cutting is certainly a factor, but one that seems to be on the decline – as fads go, it is bound to be short-lived, as it has only novelty going for it (and, of course, it makes things much cheaper if you don’t have to choreograph for more than half a second at a time). Recent CGI advances are allowing much more clarity in the action to a degree not seen before, and I suspect that after this year – provided the Matrix sequels are any good – audiences will be much less forgiving of sloppy action scenes.
Then, there’s sense of peril. The big problem is that most films can’t kill of the protagonist, but want to put them in apparent peril, ’cause that’s exciting. The bigger problem is that there’s still the equation *more* peril = *more* excitement, which is pretty easy to implement. The big problem with all this additional peril is having our protagonist deal with it. It’s tiring to film them actually acknowledging the peril and having them doing something about it (ref: Jackie Chan almost always *deals* with the perils that are presented to him). Simpler for the peril to be random and impossible to avoid except by luck. Then our protagonist merely has to run while the rubber rocks fall behind them, and the squibs go off on the ground behind them. Easy-peasy.
Boring, no matter how prettily kinetic.