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Basically in action movies when you feel that there are hostages and lives at steak, you feel that maybe there would be more loss of life, but there isn't, which arguably, could make for a less powerful story in some ways.
For example in the movie Speed (1994), which I still like nonetheless, you have a bus going at 50 mph, and cannot stop, in downtown L.A. and no one on the street gets hit by this thing. Everyone seems to survive.
One woman on the bus is killed, but she is killed a bomb rather than the hurling bus itself. There is even a scene where the bus slams into a baby carriage, knocking it in the air, but instead of a baby being inside, we see empty cans fly out. It felt like such a cop out in a way, as if the filmmakers are willing to do it, but then no.
Or in a movie like Die Hard 2 (1990), we have collateral damage in the sense that the villain was willing to kill a lot more hostages than usual, which I found refreshing, in the scene when he crashes a plane to show he means business... but we never actually see any dead bodies when John McClane is wondering through the crashed rubble. We just see rubble only. On the special features the director talks about how they shot dead bodies, but he was talked out of showing them by the others, and maybe he shouldn't have let himself be talked out of it.
I am not saying show a lot of gruesome images, but just even having one shot with a pause of bodies from McClane's point of view, could have sufficed a lot better, rather than just showing him look at rubble remains.
But what do you think? Do you think that a lot of action movies are just afraid to show more collateral damage, which could serve to make the action that much more intense, rather than showing a lot of just stunts and mostly near misses?
For example in the movie Speed (1994), which I still like nonetheless, you have a bus going at 50 mph, and cannot stop, in downtown L.A. and no one on the street gets hit by this thing. Everyone seems to survive.
One woman on the bus is killed, but she is killed a bomb rather than the hurling bus itself. There is even a scene where the bus slams into a baby carriage, knocking it in the air, but instead of a baby being inside, we see empty cans fly out. It felt like such a cop out in a way, as if the filmmakers are willing to do it, but then no.
Or in a movie like Die Hard 2 (1990), we have collateral damage in the sense that the villain was willing to kill a lot more hostages than usual, which I found refreshing, in the scene when he crashes a plane to show he means business... but we never actually see any dead bodies when John McClane is wondering through the crashed rubble. We just see rubble only. On the special features the director talks about how they shot dead bodies, but he was talked out of showing them by the others, and maybe he shouldn't have let himself be talked out of it.
I am not saying show a lot of gruesome images, but just even having one shot with a pause of bodies from McClane's point of view, could have sufficed a lot better, rather than just showing him look at rubble remains.
But what do you think? Do you think that a lot of action movies are just afraid to show more collateral damage, which could serve to make the action that much more intense, rather than showing a lot of just stunts and mostly near misses?
