The orange flames seem so realistic that one can almost feel the heat. The amount of blown up cars and buildings truly scares you. The noise sends your mind into a panic as your eyes dart around searching for one thing to focus on. Except, the scenes change incredibly fast and the cameras swivel, flip, and turn far too often, which leaves your mind scrabbling to understand what event just transpired. Modern action movies excel in noise, blown up objects, and fiery, near-death scenes. What these films lack is any semblance of a decent plot.
Movies such as Indiana Jones and Transformers can both be categorized as action movies. They thrill the audience and promise adventure. A protagonist and antagonist are blatantly apparent and usually a “damsel in distress” is present. However, Indiana Jones focuses on the plot and intense shooting or “blow up” scenes add to the story line. Transformers focused on the amount of noise a robot could make, how high a car could be blown, or how many buildings could topple down during one battle – the plot was the sideshow.
Simply watching all the Transformers movies one after the other proves the amount of focus on heavy action scenes. I liked the first movie. Nonetheless, the filmmakers ruined the movie’s reputation with the choice to not only produce a sequel, but also a third and fourth movie. Each one became louder, the “fiery” scenes stretched longer, and they had at least one or two skinny, perfectly manicured women. The age we live in relishes in drama and special effects scenes.
The Lord of the Rings is my favorite movies series. They encompass a variety of movie genres. The filmmakers did the best they could to fit the movie to the book with the amount of money available to them. I also read the Hobbit and because of the success from Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson was able to stretch a small book into three, highly detailed movies. Though The Hobbit is the prequel to Lord of the Rings, the latter was filmed first in the early to mid 2000s.
Compare the two series and one can easily see the amount of focus on heated action scenes in the Hobbit. In part, this is due to the advances in special effects, but that does not mean the producers or directors have to drag scenes out in a movie that never happened in the book. The female elf in the movie rendition of the Hobbit does not exist in the novel. She was created to add emotion and drama to the movie for better sales. The battle scene in the last movie dragged on for far too long.
Honestly, we live in a world that focuses on sales over reality. Why should the truth matter if it can’t make you any money, right? Action movies have figured this out to a bulls-eye. For example, the recently released Fast and Furious has a scene of Paul Walker running up a car as it falls over a cliff. Increasingly what the audience will witness are scenes that are impossible to accomplish in real life whether because of the law of gravity, science, or human fragility. It’s exciting to watch, but the entire focus of these movies revolves around those dramatic scenes.
Not all action movies are terrible. A small percentage has decent plots and use explosives or drama as flavor for the storyline. In my opinion, Men In Black or Captain America are decent representatives of that fact. The interesting and exciting story draws viewers in and the action makes people jump in their seats. One can follow the movie without feeling like the noise and effects are forcing you to lean back in your seat the entire time.
 Follow Jessica Foster on Twitter @jessiemarie246