Wouldn't Hold Up Today

Over at LAT, David Horsey bemoans how action movies are predictable fluff. I like this observation about 'White House Down' and 'Olympus Has Fallen':

If a viewer did not know they were made at the same time, it would be easy to think one was a remake of the other.

True -- for these two and other action movies. We see the same stuff all the time.

Horsey mentions the surprising and innovative moment in 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' when Indy shoots the highly-trained swordsman instead of taking him on hand-to-hand or sword-to-whatever. It was a funny moment, everybody in the theater laughed, and it's true -- we were all ready for some convoluted action fight sequence and it was refreshing to see the scene end so enterprisingly. It caught us off guard and people talked about it for years.

I've always liked that bit so I checked it out just for kicks. Watch the extras a few seconds into the clip. They move from left to right then, about midframe, they turn around and walk back the way they came -- all of them. They're practically tripping over one another to execute a U-turn.

Obviously, this was a practical solution used to make it look busy, like there's hundreds of people milling around instead of just, what, thirty or so, but it looks terrible. You only see four or five guys actually make the turn but the impression is pretty poor. A contemporary audience would spot this in a second but it wasn't a big deal in 1981, before kids grew up watching hundreds of movies on DVD.



Here's footage of a more conventional version where Indy fights the guy with his whip. Apparently, they couldn't make it work and gave up, but what they ended up going with, bailing out though it may have been, worked great, even with the guys shuffling back and forth in the background.

You can tell the sun is higher from the length of the shadows. It must have been hot and tiring going over the moves trying to make it convincing. Harrison Ford was probably glad for the 'just shoot him' idea -- might even have been his, to get the scene before sundown. I wonder.

Today's movies are almost always technically perfect, glossy, sure, but not as fresh feeling. This has heart you don't see much anymore.