I was chatting with a friend about the increasing escalation in movies of spectacle and action, and realizing that it’s cheapening the sense of a hero’s accomplishment.  If nothing can hurt these people then their struggles are meaningless.   This started over a discussion of the fight in Goblin town in the HOBBIT.  I really despised that whole sequence.  If felt like an amusement park ride, and the idea that people could fall vast distances and just jump up and run off made me crazy.  Bilbo would have broken every bone in his body with that fall.  It was this lack of realism that made me walk out of KING KONG.  When the heroine is bouncing on top of dinosaurs, and then Kong holds her and shakes her hard I knew he brain was applesauce at that point.  I just gave up.  Same thing in VAN HELSING  when Kate Beckinsale falls off a roof, and bounces off every branch on a tree, then jumpt up and runs off to fight more vampires.  At that moment hatred of the film set in.

Contrast this with DIE HARD, probably the best action movie ever made.  John McClane gets beat to hell over the course of those two hours.  He’s scared, and dirty and tired and bleeding.  He’s a human being fighting for his life and the lives of his wife and her co-workers.  You hurt with him.  He’s not a superhero he’s a man who pushes past his limits because he has to, and the cost is etched on his body and spirit.  McClane’s victory makes me want to stand up and cheer.  I don’t have that feeling in these modern action movies.  I’ll probably go see the new Die Hard movie out of a sense of prurient interest, but I bet it forgets all the lesson of the original and has explosions inside of explosions, and Energizer Bunny characters rather than real people.

Truthfully I’m longing for a human story where ordinary people dig deep and find the courage to go on.  I want the first half of CAPTAIN AMERICA before he obtained powers.  The story of an essentially decent man who longs to serve and will sacrifice his own life for others.  Bottom line.  No amount of action can substitute for story, and the basis for all good stories is the human heart in conflict with itself.  Not humans in conflict with monsters, explosions, cliffs, fists, swords, etc.  Ultimately here is more drama to be found in a man saying farewell to his love then a thousand battles.