How action scenes are disappearing up their own backsides

Setting out to research a major feature on the changing aesthetics of action scenes in mainstream movies, I started off by wondering if I was relatively alone in querying the trend towards incoherently constructed sequences. Using super-fast editing, violently shaking camerawork and deliberately imprecise framing, these too often seemed to me to be successful at disorienting the viewer and giving an unmistakable impression of kinetic energy, while leaving behind the comprehension, excitement and suspense that actually help an audience emotionally engage.

Film academic David Bordwell, critic Roger Ebert and his website editor, blogger Jim Emerson at Scanners, have raised these questions (click on the links to take you directly to some their pieces on the topic), but what did experienced industry practitioners, especially editors who've worked on action sequences, and film school educators think?


By the time I'd interviewed a number of specialists including the editors of The Dark Night, Inception and the forthcoming Mad Max: Fury Road, it was clear I was far from alone. Many professionals remain equally critical of this tendency and offer various reasons for it, including increasing shooting ratios and lack of planning.



Though as Salt director Phillip Noyce eloquently pointed out, incoherence is often a deliberate strategy designed to catapult the viewer into the centre of the action, especially in the films of Paul Greengrass including the Bourne sequels and Green Zone). If you feel confused at times, that's good, according to the Noyce viewpoint, because it means you're experiencing the sensations being experienced by the characters on screen.

Here's  the story, which ran in The Weekend Australian:

A drive away from coherence in action films is leading to an aesthetic best labelled 'new confusion'

THRILLERS by definition have always aimed to excite the viewer, using a battery of techniques. Classics such as Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest and the early Mad Max, Die Hard, Alien and Terminator films were constructed around brilliantly structured sequences that amounted to miniature symphonies of tension and release, full of excitement, suspense, relief and shock.

In the late 1980s and the 90s, Hong Kong films, especially the bullet ballets of John Woo, revolutionised the genre using multiple camera set-ups, elaborate choreography and slow-mo, a style given a further twist in the first Matrix film.

But a very different aesthetic has swept Hollywood action that leaves those earlier schools far behind. Not so much enabled by digital editing and hand-held cameras as pushing these technologies to the max, the new stylistics use a barrage of ultra-rapid edits, often semi-random close-ups, partial framing and violently shaking cameras.

The intention, in at least some cases, is to pitch viewers into the middle of the action, giving a visceral experience, in the words of Australia's Phillip Noyce, who directed the recent hyper-kinetic Angelina Jolie thriller Salt. But at its worst it can amount to over-the-top, incoherent filmmaking, sound and fury signifying nothing: an approach seemingly designed to excite the retina and disorient the viewer.

Examples of what we might call the "new confusion" style include:
(a) Human commandos battle a gigantic robot, or maybe several, using transporters, cars, motorbikes and -- don't ask -- an ice-cream van, but it's almost impossible to figure out where the vehicles and the robot(s) stand in relation to one another.

(b) In a frantic chase on a mountain road, a vehicle arrives out of nowhere to ram the hero's car and gunshots are exchanged. What ought to be a thrilling start to a movie is filmed and edited so chaotically, with so many lightning-fast edits and unclear shots, that it feels like you've been watching a non-narrative music video that pastiches action films.

(c) During hand-to-hand combat in an office the viewer can't tell who's gaining the upper hand during a vital central segment, because both combatants are filmed in silhouette against bright light coming through a window behind them.

The scenes described above occur respectively in last year's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, directed by Michael Bay; the most recent James Bond movie Quantum of Solace (Marc Forster); and the first of Paul Greengrass's two Jason Bourne sequels, The Bourne Supremacy. They're hardly alone.

"Action sequences seem to have been getting less coherent in the last few years, which I would attribute to a couple of factors," says Karen Pearlman, president of the Australian Screen Editors Guild, head of screen studies at the Australian Film Television and Radio School, and author of Cutting Rhythms: Shaping the Film Edit. "A big one, of course, is that speed is associated with excitement; movies are not just thrillers but fast-paced thrillers. So cutting is faster and it is harder to tell what is going on.

"But there are other things going on, too. The trickiness level of chase scenes is also inflated." Pearlman cites Salt, "where we are treated to the sight of Angelina jumping from the roof of one moving truck to another, a trick no real human, not even a Russian-trained evil super spy, could possibly ever do. So, either the fantastical nature of the trick gives the filmmakers a licence to be fast and loose with factors of realism such as time, space and gravity, or the filmmakers are thinking that to pull this off they will have to dazzle our eyes with movement from all directions and cut very fast so we can't get our bearings: they are deliberately disorienting us.

"For a chase to be well cut, in my view, it needs to move elegantly and dynamically: there actually have to be rises and falls in the pace and energy, otherwise I just get numbed to the action. The other thing they need is to keep the stakes firmly planted in my thoughts and emotions. This is accomplished by sufficient use of the shots that show me what is at stake."

Film academic David Bordwell, whose work includes a celebratory study of Hong Kong action cinema, is an outspoken critic of what he calls the "blur-o-vision" style, writing that Sylvester Stallone's The Expendables "might be a new summit in over-busy, incoherent, inconsequential action".

He adds that it "isn't an absence of craft that leads to these aimless bouts. The filmmakers actively want the action to be hard, even impossible, to follow. Sometimes I think that this blurred bustle is there to secure a PG rating; if you could really see the mayhem, we might be moving toward an R. But filmmakers don't say that they're self-censoring. They seem to think that making the action illegible is creative because it promotes realism."

Noyce is an enthusiastic proponent of the new aesthetic, adapting its methods in Salt, although in this writer's view he still makes it possible to follow what's happening throughout the action scenes. Asked if incoherence is now a problem in Hollywood action thrillers, he replies: "Not to me, but then I'm not necessarily looking as an audience member -- and I don't necessarily think the audience member is looking for coherence; they are looking for a visceral experience. If they want coherence they can watch television."

Noyce admits to being influenced by Greengrass (especially the last two Bourne sequels), but more directly by Chris Doyle, the revered Hong Kong-based Australian cinematographer he worked with on Rabbit-Proof Fence and The Quiet American. Doyle showed Noyce "the human shoulder is as good as any tripod. Our daily experience corresponds much more to that than it does to a tripod. Chris is a master of the handheld camera and started me on the process of breaking down what was an outdated aesthetic."

Greengrass's style was influenced by his background in TV investigative documentary and began to impress other filmmakers with his Northern Ireland docudrama Bloody Sunday. "When it hit the mainstream in the second of the Bourne films, it was seen very much to be revolutionary and appreciated by audiences, who felt there was extra oomph," Noyce says. "It was much more experiential. It felt like they [the viewers] were inside the action.

"The classic example of the new aesthetic was the final chase through the autobahn tunnel in Moscow, in I think the third Bourne film, where Greengrass also reinvented framing, using a lot of the time what we used to call off-cuts: the ends of shots where the camera was used for its visceral possibilities rather than its literal ability. We felt the chase from the inside, where sometimes disorientation becomes an asset because it's all about the velocity. Sometimes the pursuer and pursued don't know where they are in relation to each other.

Not all directors or film editors share Noyce's enthusiasm. Jason Ballantine, the editor on the hit Australian horror film Wolf Creek and soon to be co-editor of the upcoming Mad Max sequel Fury Road, says that "more and more I go to the cinema and get disappointed and somewhat frustrated at films that don't allow you as an audience to participate. With the older school, you always had a sense of who the good and the bad guys were and how many bullets they had left, where they stood in relationship to one another, and what the objective of the scene was. Films are now chasing their own tails in terms of one-upmanship, particularly the Bond films."

Ballantine fingers digital editing systems as one of the causes of "over-editing". Where editors used to have to physically cut the film to make an edit, it now can all be done and undone instantly, "rather than having to make the decision inside my own head and carefully considering how the sequence will come together".

Ben Ferris, director of the Sydney Film School, says his students have to learn editing on an old analog editing system in their first semester because it forces them to think carefully about the reasons behind every edit. "With the younger generation going straight to digital, the experience can get in the way of the story," he says. "I've seen this happen a lot. The young digital wizards, the last thing they have on their mind is the film itself. People who are particularly gifted at computing and therefore technically proficient editors "can seem to inexperienced filmmakers like they are a good editor".

Ferris continues: "But the technical aspect of editing is just one element. You end up with a film that's very showy, with a thunderous collection of effects and cuts that are effective in themselves, but they can tend to service themselves rather than the narrative as a whole. It can become an editing of 'spectacle'."

Ballantine adds that on some films, budgets don't allow enough time to properly plan and execute the action sequences. "It's more 'get on location and work it out on the day' . . . there's no time allowed for complex tracking moves [with smoothly moving cameras] and cranes." Cheaper cameras mean directors often set up multiple cameras -- up to 10 -- for a sequence rather than conceiving how the sequence is to be filmed beforehand.

He adds that films are getting out of control in terms of the amount of footage being shot. In the past, a ratio of 12:1 was normal (12 times as much material shot as ends up in the final movie). "Now 50:1 or even 100:1 is considered normal. That's a big strain, and I don't know that that's better filmmaking, either."

Australians Lee Smith and his assistant John Lee edited director Christopher Nolan's recent hit films Inception and The Dark Knight, which featured elaborate action sequences. They stress that while editing elaborate scenes they have lots of private screenings for small groups -- friends and family -- and then quiz them to check they've understood exactly what going on.

"It's very important to film the action scene so it has some meaning," Smith says. "It sounds simple but it's not really. It's quite easy to over-cut a sequence: make it visually exciting and lose track of what is happening and who the characters are. Sometimes the logical ability of the audience to know what's going on is lessened."

Inception, with its ultra-byzantine narrative about dreams within dreams, presented a special challenge. "The action has to be exciting but we didn't want to make it any more complicated than it needed to be," says Smith. "The action has to have cause and effect, to make the audience stay with us and not to wonder why something was happening.

"Where you can't follow action, it's not just action, it's the whole movie you can't follow. Action is very difficult, it has to be very carefully planned and conceived," Smith says, adding that he and Lee work hard to avoid "pointless cuts" or try to give a scene "colour and movement using shots of camera-waggle and blurring. It's a trick, and I'm guilty of using it [on other movies] where the action hasn't been planned as well. Those are never as good as a well-conceived sequence."

So where are action movies headed; is this it for the next 20 or so years? Perhaps not. It may be significant that not all recent big-budget action movies have followed the same path, including the world's biggest-earning film, James Cameron's Avatar. This may be partly because 3-D films require a slightly slower editing pace; as Ballantine points out, the human eye requires time to adjust to different depths of field from shot to shot. But it might also be because, having so carefully created an exotic world, Cameron wanted to make sure his audience drank it in.

In a different mode, Alfonso Cuaron's science-fiction film Children of Men contained two of the most pulse-rating action scenes of recent times, each shot virtuosically in a single, extended take (the polar opposite of the Bay and Greengrass styles). These allowed viewers to believe they were at the centre of action that was unfolding in real time around them. And Steven Spielberg's rightfully celebrated D-Day landing scene in Saving Private Ryan used a barrage of techniques to plunge the viewer into a sense of danger and confusion without losing track of the geography of the scene or the objectives of the characters. So there are plenty of cues here for the next generation of action directors to pick up.