Bigger isn't Better. Better is Better.

 (originally published September 20th, 2019)

There's a thing that annoys me in modern films, and up until recently, I didn't know it had a name.

MOVEMENT PORN.

And while I'm aware that Channel Awesome is a blazing dumpster fire, I am forced to acknowledge that the term was coined by Doug (The Nostalgia Critic) Walker in a review of, of all things, 'The Smurfs'.

"And this part takes in what I'm noticing more and more in bad family films, ... Movement Porn. "[This is] lazy movement, movement that only exists just to hypnotize your kids rather than engage them. Engaging movement involves a lot of variety. Sharp stops, varying speeds, unexpected turns, this is what make good visual storytelling. Here, everything is at the same speed, the same pacing, and the same kind of movement. There's no variation, so there's nothing interesting about it. What's more engaging, watching Mario go at one speed throughout the entire game, or watching him stop, slow down, go backwards, stomp on things? This safe, boring, and repetitive movement is the same as looking at a watch waving back and forth; they're both trying to hypnotize and relax you so that you don't think about what you're watching, and that's not what a movie is supposed to do! You're supposed to think about it, you're supposed to be sucked in, but this method is an ingenious way to numb your brains without feeling bored, so you think it must be doing something right, when really, it's just junk food for your mind, and it's all over the movie."

The problem with this sort of thing is that it's mentally frictionless. There's nothing for your mind to grasp on to so you can't engage with it. While there's lots of colour and movement, there's no sense of narrative consequence or emotional weight.

It just slides down your mental oesophagus and gets pooped out like so much audiovisual corn.

They remind me of nothing as much as they remind me of those Don Bluth animated video games ‘Dragon’s Lair’ or ‘Space Ace’ which were just a series of life or death quicktime events.

'The Hobbit' movies are lousy with it. The scene with the Stone Giants or the escape from Goblin Town are good examples. Despite the fact that boulders are raining around and characters are leaping from precarious perch to precarious perch, there's no sense of danger because none of it MEANS anything. It's just objects being flung about in front of the camera.

'Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull' is the same, and I'd say it contributes more to the film being terrible than bomb-proof fridges or little green men. Because while those are bad plot elements, at least they ARE plot elements.

Meanwhile, danger-free 'action scenes' undermine the whole REASON you're there. You want to see a story and having to stop the story for an extyended sequence where the filmmaker just waves shapes and colours in front of you for no reason is actively ANTI-STORY.

The scene in 'Phantom Menace' where a succession of sea monsters devour each other while the characters flit by like bemused spectators on a theme park ride.

Every 'Pirates of the Caribbean' film after the first is 90% Movement Porn.

Which is not to say that this applies to every extended action sequence.

The bicycle chase sequence from Jackie Chan’s ‘Project-A’ is a great example. We’re give the stakes, the scenes are laid out well, and the scene is broken down into exchanges. There’s a story behind the action which drives the narrative. Jackie is outnumbered, so he lures the villains into a series of narrow alleyways where he can take care of them one at a time. We see him do so, with every sequence escalating, adding new plot elements and then, when Jackie’s beginning to look invincible, there’s the reversal to remind us (and him) not to take success for granted and that maybe he needs to start getting while the getting’s good.

Jackie’s a master of this because he knows that big action sequences are there to drive the plot, not to replace it, and it’s not enough just to be able to have a big grandiose action set piece; you have to know WHY it’s there. At every point, Jackie’s reacting to what’s going on and trying to achieve his aim of escaping.

The crux for me was the recent Stephen Spielberg film adaption of Herge’s ‘The Adventures of Tintin’. Tintin’s adventures tend to be fairly restrained by modern action standards, and so Spielberg is a pretty good choice. His directorial choices tend towards simple, straightforward but impactful storytelling without a lot of excessive or overwrought padding. He sets ‘em up. He knocks ‘em down. And almost the whole film is great. Most of the set pieces are somewhat understated in terms of dynamic action, but given emotional and narrative weight by the storytelling. The predicament isn’t dangerous because it’s a unicycle on fire on a tightrope over a lava flow while being chased by a bear with a rocketpack. It’s dangerous because the villain has showed us he’s ruthless and determined to achieve his goals and he has no compunctions against killing to do so.

And then we get to this scene, and it feels like the film was 90% done when someone from the studio said, “We needs something we can turn into a video game!”

Suddenly all the menace and adventure and derring-do feels kind of meaningless because time and space and weight and physics and action are meaningless. It’s just shaped being thrown at a camera. It doesn’t ruin the film for me, but it feels really out of place. I think the MAIN thing I object to in scenes like this is that the heroes no longer really have any agency. They can’t DO anything, and choosing to step to the left or the right is meaningless when a boulder could fall anywhere at any time. Suddenly, it has nothing to do with the hero being brave or skilled or athletic or heroic and everything to do with just hanging on and hoping for the best - like you’re no longer an active participant in your story, just someone on a theme park jungle tour who just along for the ride.