Critics may scorn, but audiences crave the adrenaline rush.


Thirty-five years ago on June 18, Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” opened on more than 400 screens across the United States, breaking box office records and inaugurating the era of the modern summer blockbuster. Whether that was a catastrophe or a boon depends on whom you ask or what mood you’re in. But ever since “Jaws” it has been a truism that, especially in the summertime, movie audiences want action.

Action comedy, action adventure, intense action, cartoon action, thrill-ride blockbuster jump-out-of-your-seat action (or whatever those mysterious critics quoted in the ads are calling it). The word is ubiquitous - it’s what the director shouts at the start of each scene - but its meaning is elusive.

The essence of cinema - the cool thing about movies - is that the camera not only has the ability to record events in real time, but it can also conjure outright impossibilities. An ever-expanding battery of visual and temporal techniques, from simple cuts to elaborate computer-generated effects, allow filmmakers to break the laws of physics with impunity.

Do you want to see a tank hurtling through the sky and shooting down planes? A shark eating a boat? A high-speed freeway chase at rush hour, with bullets flying in all directions and trucks flipping over and bursting into flames? Tom Cruise landing a plane in a cornfield with an anxious and tipsy Cameron Diaz at his side? Maybe you don’t, but you certainly can. (In “The A-Team,” “Jaws,” just about any Brett Ratner movie and “Knight and Day,” in case you were wondering.)

And once you have, what do you make of such spectacles? Action - as a genre, and also as a source of sensation - has, at best, a mixed critical reputation. It is often dismissed as mindless, stupid or empty, which is not always wrong but often beside the point. Action fans may crave the rush of noise, speed and hectic incident, but their appreciation is not necessarily indiscriminate. And from a director’s perspective the conception and execution of a good action sequence is among the most painstaking and complicated parts of the job. Coordinating vehicles, bodies, weapons and whatever else happens to be handy (monsters, buildings, livestock, shipping containers, kitchen utensils) into a controlled and coherent episode of chaos is a notably demanding kind of work.

How do you do something that hasn’t quite been done before, and how do you make it work, so that the audience is thrilled, surprised and entertained? These are, to some degree, technical questions having to do with camera placement, editing rhythm and timing. They are also financial matters, since nothing ever crashes or blows up for free.

And, perhaps more than anything else, it is the pursuit of more, bigger and better action effects that has driven Hollywood’s frenetic, headlong, exhausting history of innovation.

The earliest westerns, railroad pictures and slapstick two-reelers of the silent era set the prototype for what would follow, thrilling spectators with horses, trains and motor cars swerving and colliding in front of mostly stationary cameras. And though the delivery systems have grown larger and more sophisticated, that basic thrill has endured - the jolt of adrenaline produced by a carefully engineered dose of velocity and danger.

The westerns of the 1930s, with their thundering hoofbeats and fancy equestrian stunt work, found a sturdy formula. As did the combat pictures that emerged during World War II, in which directors learned to adapt moviemaking to new forms of mechanized warfare.

A little later, in the 1950s, movies responded to the threat of television by growing in scale, and the age of CinemaScope and Technicolor ushered in an aesthetic of hugeness that was a truer premonition of our time than the scrappy swashbuckling of “Jaws.”

The state-of-the-art action sequence from the ‘50s is surely the chariot race in William Wyler’s “Ben-Hur,” filmed on a Cinecitta back lot with thousands of extras, human and equine, on a set that took months to build. All of that time and labor goes up on the screen in a sequence that seems at once hurtling and endless, and that builds tension through the careful alternation of perspectives.

You look down at the buggies whipping around the track, and then you are right there ? now close enough to see the flaring of the horses’ nostrils (and Charlton Heston’s), now down where the wheels spin in the dust.

They don’t make them like that anymore. They don’t need to, now that horses and crowds can be generated by computer. Still, good action is harder than it looks. This remains true even today as the available technology makes it look a little too easy.


A. O. SCOTT