Introduction
A common criticism of action movies is that they’re simply excuses for fights and explosions with little to no redeeming artistic merit and no characterisation. While this is true of some films, I don’t believe it’s a valid detraction of action-packed movies when at their best.
I want to look at what I believe makes a good action scene, and how these can be best used to progress the story in a way that dialogue simply can’t. Please note, this isn’t to say dialogue-heavy and slow-paced films are bad, this is more a counter to the argument that action = stupid.
Finally, I’ll be using clips from Jackie Chan’s Snake in Eagle’s Shadow and New Police Story, and Stephen Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, some of which may contain spoilers, so this is a general spoiler warning for the rest of this post.
What Makes Good Action?
I believe there are three key aspects to any good action sequence: Character, Motivation, and Stakes. When these three features are used well, an action scene can take the place of an expositionary or dialogue-heavy scene to progress the plot in a thrilling and engaging manner.
While the technical ability of the actors and the choreographers can always make a fight scene fun to watch, without these three aspects, they ultimately are not memorable and instead are more like a gymnastics routine than part of a story’s structure.
For example, consider these two clips:
The first is the final fight from Snake in Eagle’s Shadow, an early Jackie Chan movie.
Every actor in this scene is an undoubtedly talented martial artist and performer, and it’s a fun fight to watch, however without dialogue we have little to distinguish each actor (other than Bad Kung Fu guy and Good Kung Fu guy). We get no real sense of their Character, as they all fight in roughly the same manner, following set martial arts styles without any context as to whether it’s a good or bad thing.
For example, Jackie switches to the Cat Claw technique roughly half way through the fight at the 3:30 mark, turning the tables and beginning to win. However, we have no idea of whether this was a good or bad thing for Jackie as a character, whether it is a difficult technique to use, or whether it’s a style unique to him. The villain doesn’t react with shock or surprise, Jackie’s master is neither shown to be supportive nor dismayed, and Jackie shows no personal reaction to his decision to change.
As such, it’s hard to get a sense of who these people are beyond what they can do. The villain is not shown to be notably more violent or aggressive than Jackie and his master, Jackie isn’t either pushed to his absolute limit or holding back out of a sense of honour, and each actor could essentially play each other’s part without any real difference.
By focussing exclusively on the acrobatic and technical abilities of the actors, we also have no idea what the Motivation of each character is unless explicitly stated in dialogue. They stand alone in a featureless field, and so without dialogue to explain otherwise, we have no idea if they’re fighting to the death, fighting for honour, fighting over land, or just plain fighting.
The location of the fight provides no context for their battle, and their costumes only tell us that this is set in some kind of Chinese historical period.
Without a firm grounding of Character and Motivation, we therefore also have no sense of the Stakes of this fight. As I’ve just discussed, we have little understanding of the context of this fight from this scene alone, so we don’t know what each character stands to gain or lose from battle.
Is this the last stand against a previously unstoppable villain? Will other people fight him too, and so Jackie is doing this for the honour of victory? Is Jackie misguided and ultimately on the wrong side? Once again, without dialogue, we have no idea.
As such, we can’t feel any real connection to anything presented onscreen, and instead the appeal from this scene comes from simply witnessing the impressive technical display of martial arts of the actors. While this is of course a large part of the appeal of the genre, it does mean there is little to engage the viewer beyond the most basic visual stimulus, ultimately making it unremarkable when you consider there are easily dozens of other films that can provide similar levels of action and acrobatics.
Compare this to the second clip, which is of the infamous knife fight from Saving Private Ryan.
The fight scene is nowhere near as polished as the other, and these actors clearly do not possess the martial arts training and skill of the kung fu stars. However, it is a far more engaging and affecting scene.
While it can be argued that the gruesome and unflinching finish of the fight makes it more viscerally effective in a manner that would be inappropriate in a Jackie Chan film, Saving Private Ryan immediately presents the Character, Motivation and Stakes of all involved, grabbing the viewer’s attention well before the final stabbing.
In the first 20 seconds, we see Mellish grapple with the German soldier while Upham nervously climbs the stairs. We are shown the two men fighting are roughly evenly matched, not exceptionally well-trained (and therefore most-likely not career soldiers and enthusiastic participants in war), and that Upham is clearly terrified of even approaching the fight, despite having a weapon that is overwhelmingly superior to a simple knife.
As the fight progresses, the German gets the upper hand, forcing Mellish to use his last ounce of strength to hold off the German as long as possible. Still, it is not enough, and the German begins to fatally stab Mellish. However, as he does so, he begins to speak to Mellish. Even without translation, his tone is clearly apologetic and remorseful, and we are given the sense that he takes no joy in his victory.
This ties directly into demonstrating each character’s Motivation, with both Mellish and the German simply wanting to survive the fight, while Upham, in contrast, wants to intervene and save Mellish, yet he is prevented from doing so by his own fear.
In this way the conflict is not just physical, but moral as well, as we the viewer can see that if Upham is able to overcome his terror he will be able to save his friend, achieving growth as a character by facing his fears. However, he is unable to do so, and the German kills Mellish. When the German emerges from the room, he barely even acknowledges Upham as either a person or a threat, reiterating both his Character traits as an unwilling warrior, and his Motivation to simply survive a fight to the death, rather than to kill for the sake of killing.
With both Character and Motivation firmly established, we therefore get a strong sense of the Stakes both from the actors on screen, and the context of war raging around them.
We immediately recognise that this is a fight of life and death, with the added moral component of Upham’s battle with his own cowardice. The contrast of the surrounding battle scenes, fought with guns, explosives and war machines drives home the barbaric and timeless nature of their hand-to-hand fight to the death, showing basic unchanging nature of war, where one person kills another.
By firmly establishing Character, Motivation and Stakes early on, the film presents a far more emotionally engaging scene, revealing the strengths and flaws of its characters without dialogue or exposition, and effectively progressing the story.
The obvious criticism of my analysis is that a Jackie Chan kung fu adventure and a Steven Spielberg war epic will clearly have considerably different tones, styles, and intended audiences. However, I believe that in any genre you can improve action scenes by focussing on these three attributes.
You can even compare Snake in Eagle’s Shadow with Jackie Chan’s later work, such as this fight from New Police Story.
In this scene, we see parents and children running from the violence, with the villain clearly unworried by the possibility of shooting or otherwise harming civilians during the fight, contrasting with Jackie’s concern for their safety.
Throughout the fight, the villain is the more aggressive of the two, clearly enjoying the fight, throwing several objects at Jackie during the early stages of the battle, and also becoming frustrated whenever he’s losing.
He also continues to fight even after Jackie has both won and is willing to stop fighting, showing his motivation extends beyond the enjoyment of a fair fight to just plain winning, while his emotional reaction demonstrates that for the villain, the stakes extend beyond the fight itself to maintaining his ego and need for victory.
The fight is still classic Jackie Chan action, with several excellent moments of outstanding martial artistry, but in contrast to Jackie’s earlier work, we the audience are given a far greater understanding of the narrative tension in the scene without the need for dialogue to provide context.
You may also quite reasonably claim that sometimes all you want is a mindless action movie, and that not everything has to be Oscar bait. This is also entirely fair, however these three aspects ensure that we as the audience are never lost during the movie. Even if we’re not entirely clear on why what’s happening is happening, we still have several visual cues to demonstrate the progress of the narrative and the effects of the characters’ actions at all times.
It’s true that each of the clips I’ve shown are parts of the larger story within the context of their respective films, and that exposition can come from scenes surrounding the action, rather than the action itself.
However the strength of something like Saving Private Ryan is that even if you have no idea of what’s happened before this scene, you still have strong indicators to highlight the film’s themes of the horror of war, and the moral relativism of active warfare.
In fact, those who’ve seen this film will know that the Saving Private Ryan clip I showed is actually only about half as long as the full fight shown in the movie. I was originally going to use a full-length clip, but I found that even this two minute clip still had everything needed for any viewer to understand what was happening.
This is what keeps an audience engaged, stopping films from feeling bloated and too long.
For another example, the Hobbit films had literal hours of exposition, however it was a common criticism that it was still unclear what was going on, and that the action was largely meaningless as a result.
The bloated nature of the final battle in the Battle of the Five Armies is a direct result of the action not having any clear goal, with none of the actors involved showing anything to especially differentiate themselves from each other.
You can compare this to the more engaging Battle for Helmsdeep at the end of Two Towers (basically only two armies of orcs vs humans, a simple goal to defend Helmsdeep, and the loss of an important region at stake), but ultimately any film will benefit from having a clear goal of showing Character, Motivation, and Stakes in any action piece.
Final Thoughts
So now you know what I think makes good action, but I realise movies aren’t an objective art form, and there will always be exceptions to any rules.
I’m very interested to hear what other people think about this, and if you disagree with anything I’ve said, or my interpretation of the clips I’ve referenced, so please leave a comment if you have anything you’d like to add.
Submitted August 28, 2017 at 09:42PM by D-Bot2000 http://ift.tt/2vnkPOE
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