The REEL Addict 

(Note: Given my recent frustrations with the spastic editing of the action scenes in QUANTUM OF SOLACE, I thought I would repost this article written earlier this year seeing as it has once again become topical).

This has been a pet-peeve of mine for some time now, but while recently watching JUMPER, I just got to the point where I felt I needed to get it off my chest. Mostly because I realized while it once was a trend, it now seems to have become an established technique. What I’m talking about is the tendency of films these days to have near seizure inducing editing in a film. Usually it occurs in fast-paced action bonanzas were some fight takes places, whether it involves just two guys fighting, a shoot-out, or just lots of explosions (or in the case of a Michael Bay or Tony Scott film, all of the above). Scenes like that are often edited so rapidly, with so many cuts and changing shots, that half-the-time it’s pretty impossible to make out what’s even going on. It drives me nuts. I didn’t pay $12 dollars to wait an entire film for a culminating final battle (or heck, an opening battle), only to have my eyes be unable to process so many subsequent images at once, leaving me seeing nothing but blurs.

Naturally, I understand the (supposed) artistic motivation behind it. The director and editor are aspiring to some form of verisimilitude; the editing is meant to stylistically mirror the kinetic franticness such a fight would have in reality. It’s meant to make you feel like you’re involved in the scene, and there through get you more pumped up about it. The quick editing makes it seem like more things are happening at a more frantic pace, and therefore the events become more exciting, right? Wrong. I appreciate the creative ambitions behind the editing, but I’d rather see what’s going on then have to settle for misplaced artistic ambitions in an action film. Instead of supposedly sucking me into the events, it alienates me instead. 

Even from a financial point of view it makes little sense to me. Here a studio invests hundreds of thousands of dollars on training the actors to build up their bodies, teaching them how to fight, choreographing the fight, then buying squibs or explosives for the scenes, and having six cameras set up at the same time to record the event from multiple angles, only to deprive us of properly seeing the end result of all that money and hard work?

What do you guys think? Do you agree that films (especially action films) need to slow down their editing and let us see what’s actually going on, or do you think I’m just a guy whose brain is clearly too slow to process images fast enough?