When did action movies change from being classically shot and aware of space and geography, to all this frantic half-second editing and shaky-cam nonsense? A fascinating two-part video essay tries to answer that question.
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I frequent Jim Emerson’s Scanners<\/em> blog. Recently, he had a great piece<\/a> that highlighted a well-reasoned, well-constructed video essay about the state of modern action cinema. Film scholar Matthias Stork nicknames it “Chaos Cinema,” and for good reason. So many action movies today feature hyperactive editing and full-blown climactic plateaus of action that never come down for a breath. Scenes in many of today’s films seem to eschew spatial geography, and never let the viewer become aware of the scene’s surroundings. Instead, quick cuts and lazy camerawork paste together hyper-aggressive sequences of whizzing bullets and flailing bodies.<\/p>\n Stork’s video essay is perhaps the best explanation of today’s Chaos Cinema I’ve ever seen. He seamlessly compares recent movies like ‘Bad Boys II<\/a>‘ and ‘Transformers<\/a>‘ to well-constructed action scenes from ‘Die Hard<\/a>‘ and ‘Hard Boiled<\/a>‘.<\/p>\n