Rescue the real action

Rescue the real action

Action films are often about a hunt, especially for movies set in a modern context (westerns, crime films). Flight is an instinctive act of the hunted (animal), and the hunter must submit to the vortex of this chase. Taking The Killer as a starting point for this discussion, as it provides a simple example, the two main characters, "Mickey mouse" and "dumbo", are respectively the hunted (a gangster) and the hunter (a cop). In the process of investigating Mickey mouse's whereabouts, Dumbo gradually became curious about and fascinated by this fugitive, even expressing admiration for Mickey mouse to his assistant. It's a fate where the hunter is attracted to the animal, and those hunters who are well-versed in the animal's habits might even learn to howl like wolves in the deep night. The hunted begins to realize that only the hunted can truly understand him, and so the hunter becomes the slave and spiritual companion of the hunter. Eventually, the society behind the hunter will abandon him, because modern civilization does not welcome that way of life. Thus, modernity may not welcome action films. However, the reality seems to contradict this. As Hong Kong martial arts films underwent a modern revolutionary transformation, while inheriting the classical aesthetic landscapes of Hu Jinquan, Tsui Hark made the characters' actions more fluid, rich, and exaggerated.Without going into deeper understanding, as an analogy, in the development of animation, the animators also made the lines and scenes more dynamic and exaggerated. As for the much-discussed French New Wave films, the characters are full of all kinds of unpredictable improvisations and impulses.

In fact, the relationship between a director and the films they shoot is also a relationship between a hunter and prey. Only this time, the hunter seems to have taken the initiative, as the director's concerns and interests fundamentally constitute their frames. For John Woo, there is hardly any danger in his films; the blood that flows from the characters is only to accentuate their white suits. Characters can run out of explosions or fall from windows unscathed; death depends on when the director decides to strike the fatal blow to the laughable character arcs. And the characters' actions are only to accommodate the arbitrary, savage splashes of color. In essence, John Woo provides a kind of cheapest aesthetics, which was a derivative product after a superficial understanding and oversimplified categorization of modern film aesthetics. In his films, all the action sequences are just an exhilarating lullaby, visually saturated but never reaching the body.

In contrast, Johnnie To seems to be a spiritual heir to the golden age of Hollywood, as his films often shine with the glory of plot dramas. In his films, guns are ordinary, closer to guns in real life, and the bullets fired are dangerous. The characters are distinct, and their personalities dictate the forms of action. In The Mission, people's choices determine the way and direction the guns point, and everyone is holding a gun while also being held at gunpoint. The guns are in motion and stillness, and the characters' images constantly present different forms or make different choices as the film progresses. Undoubtedly, John Woo is an excellent emotional manipulator. However, the action still cannot escape a point, even when it is stretched out for a long time, such as those ten-minute gunfights or close-quarters combat, or even when the protagonists stop to chat during a crisis, or when rhythm is created through slow motion in the style of Zack Snyder. But this point can never escape its own abstractness and conceptuality; it merely serves to replace or simply combine with nearby things. Beyond that, it amounts to nothing. The Mission is a film that examines the viewer's aesthetic experience：Taxi Night contains clues about the situation, the internal conflict (disaffected mercenaries versus the team leader) versus the external conflict (an unknown enemy with more strength than expected), and also provides a segue to the next fight (how the conflict is resolved); Kick the Paper Dough is a comedy about the air, and a node that creates contrast as well as change; ...... The action serves a conceptual cue (the most single-minded) by design, which the audience has to extract for themselves. A few more examples. Nolan seems to loathe performative acrobatic action, even when he makes superhero films where the characters simply fight with their fists. And Nolan cares about the genesis of the action; in Tenet, the agent who has travelled through the time machine fights his past self in a way that defies time, an action scene that the director works out. In Inception, both the snowy plains and the city are placed in a highly conceptual setting, and Nolan observes the way the characters move through this new world. The action is the result of the world (and the result is a kind of "point"), which is perhaps why Nolan insists on shooting it for real, even though his characters live in a bubble; Spielberg's War of the Worlds is the most inert of all, where the action is categorised in the simplest terms in the crypt scene of an alien hideout, with the mysterious alien creatures following the most common modus operandi, and here we see no imagination, just a piece of inertia introduced into the writing. This is a stumbling block to an adventure, but it is not a material or physical force that overcomes this stone, but rather the execution of a kind of code substitution, a circulation of currency.

In My Darling Clementine the protagonist draws his gun twice. Once is in the final showdown (which seems to be an unavoidable scripted action), and the other is to prevent "the Doctor" from leaving town, which doesn't even involve a duel, but rather a routine behavior. In this segment, neither the de-action of action nor the narrativization of action (the opposite of the climactic ending) is involved. John Ford elementizes the action elements here, with the saloon, the small town, the guns, the Indians, appearing almost in the most concise yet complex configurations, like the smoke flowers, temples, festivals, and cherry blossoms that repeatedly appear in Japanese films. The protagonist's abilities are never hinted at, nor are they ever placed in an absolute contradiction. The originally intense action is infinitely routinized at these moments. Holy Motors recalls "action" through another extreme: modern society becomes the jungle, full of complex, primitive hunting relationships, and the operation of action is so simple, entirely out of a bodily instinct ... Here is a summary,action films have always been hijacked by the visual (and thus lost their physicality), like John Woo's, or the movement has been appropriated by a point of purpose. Few action films really celebrate the action itself or bring it back to its everydayness, which, although it tends to stray from the action film or the genre, is still a certain kind of ideal action film.

The action movie is almost a movie of the body, and naturally a certain kind of young man's movie, possessing great power against the old man's movie, the movie of mediocrity. Drugs are indolent, as is the temptation of money. All external temptations try to turn the world into an equivalent exchange of average motion, like a delicious piece of meat dangling in front of us, creating an illusion of action: what makes us act is the temptation before our eyes, not our bodies, feet, and souls.

wirtten by Orange