Summer blockbusters have to have exciting set-pieces, action scenes where people throw punches, cars get chased, and things get blowed up real good. You might say they are the raison-d'etre of the entire genre. The spectacle of these movies is what puts bums on seats. But in a good movie, the spectacle isn't empty. It serves a purpose, both in terms of the drama, and in terms of the structure of a film.
One of the most important rules of telling a gripping story is that you have to be constantly raising the stakes. With every twist and turn of the plot, things have to become more and more desperate for our protagonists. In terms of action set-pieces, this means that every set piece has to be more impressive, exciting and meaningful than those that came before.
There's a very good reason for this rule, a very practical reason: if you put your most exciting set piece in the middle of the movie, or near the beginning, you will fail to impress the audience with every subsequent set piece, and they will feel let down. In other words, you have blown your wad too early, leaving the audience in a state of disappointment, and leaving yourself in a state of shame. Y'know, just like in real life.
Sounds simple, right? Two rules to follow:
1) Make your set-pieces exciting and relevant to the characters and the story.
2) Make sure that each set piece is more exciting, impressive and relevant than the one that came before.
Given the talent and budget involved in making a film like this, it's surprising to me how often these rules are ignored or overlooked.
Let's look at the blockbusters from this past summer, and see how they measure up:
Thor: The Dark World
Frankly, I can't even remember most of the action set pieces from this movie. I feel like this has to do with my complete lack of investment in Thor's character. (See this post.) But as I recall, at least they get more epic and impressive (in theory) as the film goes on. The climactic dimension-hopping slugfest with Malekith the Entirely Unmemorable would have been a lot more impressive if I cared about either character. Talk about working on the fundamentals, people.
The Wolverine
Oy, where to begin with the Wolverine. Okay, so there's one cool fight in the movie, the fight atop the high-speed bullet train. It's exciting, it's a challenge for the character. It made me gasp with excitement and awe a few times. So they got that going for them. But that's one scene, and it's not very long. Whereas every other action scene in the movie is pretty underwhelming. The fight against the yakuza goons at the funeral is pretty boring, as is the sword/claw fight with Mariko's father.
But what really ticks me off in this movie is the climax. The whole film, they've been building to: Wolverine fights ninjas. They tease us with the ninjas storming the Yashida compound, they show Wolverine walking up to a Yashida village … and then they just shoot him with arrows and drag him inside the complex. The end. Wolverine doesn't fight a single ninja. Not one. I couldn't believe my eyes. And then he fights a big boring robot that they have instead of the actual Silver Samurai. Again, couldn't believe it. Talk about dropping the ball.
Star Trek Into Darkness
Star Trek Into Darkness is something of an improvement. The fights, chases and so-forth build nicely, both in terms of stakes and in terms of visceral excitement - up to a point. For me, the high point of was Khan and Kirk's flight through the debris field to the enemy spaceship. The tension is raised because of Khan's questionable relationship to the protagonists - and then we find that Scotty is in trouble with one of the space-ship's crew - and then Kirk develops a crack in his faceplate and his navigation goes offline … it's a tense, exciting sequence.
Where the film fumbles the ball is in the visually underwhelming climax - the chasedown of Khan feels like something I could see in any number of pedestrian action films - not something that belongs in a star trek films. And frankly, just beating Khan to a pulp isn't a very satisfying end to the supposed big bad of the film.
Man of Steel
Man of Steel features the simple problem of us not caring. The last 45 minutes of the film are a non-stop orgy of super-powered violence, and I will give credit where credit is due - it's a visually impressive series of super-punches and buildings getting knocked down. Where the film fails utterly is in giving us any reason to care, and in loading all of this impressive destruction at the end of the film. Furthermore, the fights become dull and repetitive: Superman punches someone, someone punches him back, but no real consequences are given and no stakes are raised. Nowhere (except for the film's horrendously out of character climax) are any civilians put in direct jeopardy, nor are there any twists or dramatic revelations that change the context of the fight.
And it is that horrendous climax that seals Man of Steel's fate. It attempts to raise the stakes by having Zod threaten the civilians in the train station, and tries to present us with a moral quandary - will Superman be forced to kill him to save the lives of those civilians? However, this is a false quandary. Even sitting in the movie theatre, I could think of several ways for Superman to escape that scenario (including flying away, turning Zod's head, putting his hand over Zod's eyes) none of which he attempts. Instead, David Goyer and Zack Snyder commit the grievous sin of going against the fundamental nature of a character in order to falsely elicit a "dark, gritty, emotional ending." They think this will make the action, and the climax, more powerful and meaningful. Instead, they accomplish the opposite.
Okay, so things are looking pretty grim. But there were two movies this summer who really got structure and stake-raising in an intelligent way.
Pacific Rim
Guillermo del Toro's delightful monster mash isn't going to win any Oscars. But it understands intuitively how to raise the stakes. Every fight between Kaiju and Jaeger has something at stake - from the life of our hero's brother in the first fight, to the fate of our entire planet in the last. (See how things suddenly got a lot more epic over the two hour course of the film?) And even though the fights are all between robots and monsters, they never get stale. The locations change. The weapons change. The monsters change. The final fight is at the bottom of the ocean, for heaven's sake!
But this summer's clear winner is …
Iron Man 3
In Iron Man 3, Shane Black masterfully raises the stakes again and again. Every set piece is different from the one that came before, and in each the tension rises and the consequences become more dire. And then, just when you think things can't get any more dire for our heroes - they do! New wrinkles abound at every turn, forcing Tony to think on his feet and threatening things he holds dear as a character.
And of course, in terms of sheer excitement, it simply builds and builds wonderfully. We're given just a taste of Tony in action in the suit before it's taken away from him - and then he spends much of the rest of the film surviving by his wits and ingenuity. Of course, when the Iron Man suit is returned to him, he immediately goes into action in a truly thrilling mid-air rescue on Air Force One. It was the big action set piece in all the trailers - and it's not even the end of movie. There's another high-stakes battle in which all the stops of special-effects wizardry and character motivation are pulled out. And amid all the flying metal suits and red-hot super-soldiers, there isn't an unclear or confusing moment of action, or one instance of shaky-cam. Michael Bay should be taking notes.
When you're making an action movie, you can't just slap some CGI flimflammery together and expect it to make your film exciting and memorable. For that, you have to pay attention to structure, and to storytelling.
PS: While I haven't been including it as a blockbuster, I want to give a shout out to Edgar Wright's World's End, which despite being mostly a comedy, has some of the most visceral and exciting fight scenes of any film this year. If this is the quality of action we can expect in Ant Man, we are in for a treat.
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