The Golden Age

When I woke up Saturday morning I turned on my spiffy HDTV, which was tuned to TNT, as it was the night before to watch the NBA Playoffs. Batman Forever was just starting, featuring an all star cast including Nicole Kidman, Jim Carrey, Tommy Lee Jones, Val Kilmer, and Chris O'Donnell (who is thisclose to being relegated to a career of nothing but Lifetime movies). About 20 minutes in, it dawned on me that this was the worst movie I'd seen since Stealth. I was shocked how bad it was. I mean, during action sequences it was like I was watching the Ice Capades. In the last 5 years we've witnessed, arguably, the 7 greatest comic book movies of all time: Blade II, Spider-Man, X-Men 2, Spider-Man 2, Sin City, Batman Begins, and V for Vendetta (listed chronologically).

Why the sudden shift from the nonsensical kiddie flicks to the hyperkinetic (sometimes ultra) mature films? I could come up with two explanations:

1. Studio execs and screenwriters that in positions of power now grew up reading the more mature comics that came along in the late 70s and 80s: Swamp Thing, Green Arrow, Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and Sandman. Alan Moore is the man most responsible for this change in the comic landscape, and it's fitting that V for Vendetta, one of his first works, has been adapted to film, although without Moore's involvement. Nor was he involved in From Hell or The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which bastardized his work. Unbreakable by M. Night Shyamalan, in particular, was heavily influenced by The Watchmen. Robert Rodriguez was already familiar with Frank Miller's Sin City before he started filming it.
2. The evolution of filming fight scenes, largely due to the runaway success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Matrix. Thanks to the groundbreaking work of martial arts choreographer Woo-ping Yuen, whose work also includes Kill Bill Volumes 1 & 2, Fist of Legend, Iron Monkey, Drunken Master 1 & 2, Once Upon a Time in China I & II, Kung Fu Hustle, and Fearless, among others (each one is fantastic, but Fist of Legend is particularly great). Fight scenes in movies like Die Hard and the James Bond movie were extremely deliberate; bad guy kicks good guy, good guy grabs his leg, good guy pauses to flex, good guy tosses bad guy by the leg. And those were the good fight scenes! The fight scenes of the last decade tend to be more fluid and brutal. You can see the influence in all the movies mentioned, the Star Wars prequels, Equilibrium, Serenity, the Underworld movies, the Tomb Raider movies, and the Resident Evil movies.