Success of action films still
questionable
By Ryan Eloe
Skiff Staff

Guns, bombs and fighting draw viewers to movies. And it’s with action films that the ideas and images of forceful destruction can take viewers hostage.

The action film genre is traditionally quite different from the horror genre. We don’t watch a Jackie Chan movie to create internal fear. This sort of action film isn’t likely to be the films that get inside your head and cause you to be disturbed. Granted, Hollywood produces both types of films: Action films that create fear and those that do not.

The upcoming film “Panic Room” staring Jodi Foster appears to be a film that might get inside your head as it appears to aim to thrill and suspend viewers imagination into a state of wonderment.

After Sept. 11, action films intended to create a temporary theatrical adrenaline rush, suddenly had the potential of being a film that would scare or infuriate. For some films, untimely releases were scheduled, and movie posters needed to be taken down. For others, scenes needed to be re-edited.

Now as the spring movie season hits, some of those films are beginning to revisit us. It raises curiosity to whether, nearly five months later, we have adjusted and are ready to return to a state where we can watch these films for enjoyment alone.

Feb. 8 will bring us the release of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s most recent brainless explosion spree, “Collateral Damage.”

Schwarzenegger plays a firefighter who witnesses a bomb blast kill his wife and son. The film then goes on to show Schwarzenegger’s attempt to find the terrorist and bring him to justice.

Certainly, this is not an untypical story for Schwarzenegger to star in. Yet “Collateral Damage” hits a new nerve with society that, had this film been released a year earlier, would have lost a great deal of its controversial edge.

Other films were moved around and nudged to other places on the release calendar. The comedy “Big Trouble” was slated to be released Sept. 21. This film is directed by Barry Sonnenfeld who also directed “Men In Black,” “Wild Wild West” and “The Addams Family.”

Almost a year ago, before the film entered production, Variety reported that the film is “an ensemble comedy about how a bomb in a suitcase changes the lives of a divorced dad, an unhappy housewife, two teenagers, two hit men, two street thugs, two FBI men and a toad.”

Yet this family friendly film wasn’t appropriate for families all of a sudden. Bombs in suitcases were not a matter for comedy, but a matter of tragedy.

Columbia pictures has made efforts to be sensitive with their release of the film “Spider-Man,” slated for an early May release. After the tragedy, all posters and trailers were pulled from theaters, even the Web site for the film changed the day of the terrorist attacks. This comic-book-turned-movie had the unfortunate luck to be running a film campaign that showed images of Spider-Man scaling tall buildings and a trailer with the World Trade Center reflecting in the eyes of the super hero.

Yet now, time has passed. Film companies have done whatever possible to run these films, yet not be insensitive in light of tragedy. These businesses surely do not think America has become callous to the tragedy that devastated the world. Yet, they also are banking that America is less sensitive than they were a couple months ago.

Yet, perhaps the fear should not be America’s sensitivity to images of the ultra-violent films such as “Resident Evil,” “Blade 2” and “Collateral Damage.” Rather, a greater fear should be people’s desire to see the artificial blood and guts on the screen, when their mind already visits these images when they read the newspaper and watch the nightly news.

Or then again, the film climate may not really have changed at all, and in time we simply returned to the same equilibrium that we sat at before.

America was shaken Sept. 11. Maybe the terrorist attacks had no long-term effects on what movies we see, or how we give to othersor the way we live our lives everyday.
Will “Collateral Damage” make the huge box office gains that Warner Brothers desire? Surely, it would have raked in dough had we never seen smoke filled skies, burning buildings and crying children. Now that we’ve seen all that, the success of this movie and others slated for the next couple of months are in question.

The money made by these films will tell us a great deal about ourselves. They will serve as a barometer, measuring whether we’ve really changed at all.

Ryan Eloe is a junior international economics major from Centennial, Colo.
He can be reached at (r.c.eloe@student.tcu.edu).

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TCU Daily Skiff © 2002