(I was going to write a review of The Desolation of Smaug but it occurred to me that there were several relevant movie-related posts that I needed to get off my chest first. And if I did them in my Smaug review it would just get ridiculously bloated and go off on tangents. So here are a few backlogged posts on various subjects related to movies. They don’t need to be read to follow the Smaug review. I just need them around for reference.)

One of the most common complaints about the first Hobbit movie was its length. But Hobbit I was not unusual in having an overlong running time. Almost all movies these days are bloated well beyond any reasonable running length. It’s become unusual to find a movie under two hours in length. This trend has many parents, but one of the most egregious is the explosion of long long action scenes that frequently end with nothing resolved or changed, advance the plot at a snail’s pace (if at all) and frequently exist only for their own sake (or because they are part of pre-programmed action beats).

I became aware of this in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. It was good, but the climactic swordfight had me shifting in my chair. It’s not just that it went on and on. It was that nothing was resolved and nothing could be resolved because the enemy pirates were undead anyway. So the climax consisted of minute after minute of boring, poorly shot, pointless sword-fighting. This tendency toward long, pointless, inconclusive action scenes would blow up badly in the next two movies.

I’ve since noticed this pattern recurring over and over again and getting even worse. Every fight goes on forever, every character has to have his signature moment, every “amazing” stunt they can think of has to be in there. And it has frequently hurt the scenes themselves, which often make no sense. Both sides use nonsensical tactics because these are no longer battles either side is trying to win; they are a series of stunts and gimmicks that the director has decided to string together. And it gets absurd. By the time they’re halfway through, the characters have effectively run a marathon but they’re still able to jump impossibly high, kill bad guys without looking and hurl one-liners. There’s no sense that fighting is stressful on mind, spirit or body.

Quentin Tarantino has become one of the worst at this. Kill Bill I had an endless fight with the Crazy 88’s that just had to include every possible stunt. Nothing could be left on the floor. In Django Unchained, probably the worst victim of movie bloat last year, the climactic gunfight goes on and on and ends with … nothing. Django is captured instead of shot dead on the spot, as he would almost certainly be in any sensible movie.

Hobbit I suffered from this. A lot of criticism of the movie’s length focused on the dinner scene. But while that drags out a bit, it’s mostly humor and character-building, which is fine by me. The Rivendell sequence drags on as well (Weaving and Blanchett, in particular, speak verrrry slowly). But I think that’s also a minor problem.

No, I think people misidentified the primary culprit. To my mind, the movie’s deeper problem is the long action scenes, which go on and on. The climactic fight in the Misty Mountains is particularly egregious, with every character having to get their moment to kick butt, every possible permutation of enemies having to face off and every stunt having to be included. It’s not enough to get Azog fighting Thorin. He has to fight Bilbo, too. He has to fight the other dwarves. He has to fight the eagles. It’s like Peter Jackson couldn’t make up his mind which kick-ass moment he wanted to end on, so he threw them all in. And, in the end, nothing is resolved. No named character is even wounded.

I’ll have a rant about Star Trek: Into Darkness in another post but it suffers from an awful case of action movie bloat as well. It ends with a chase through space, a chase through the streets, a chase through the air. And, in the end, they couldn’t make up their mind about whether Uhura or Spock should kick Kahn’s ass, so they both do. And no one of name is killed (well, Kirk briefly is). You can contrast that against Star Trek II, a massively superior movie that was 20 minutes shorter and had maybe a quarter of the action scenes. The first battle between Reliant and Enterprise is tense, thrilling and brilliant. The strategies are plain. It’s clear why everyone is doing what he’s doing and what they’re trying to accomplish. Although it ends with neither party destroyed, both ships are damaged, a named character is killed and the repercussions are felt throughout the rest of the film, informing the strategy for the second battle. And it takes about ten minutes of total screen time. In a modern movie, Kirk would have pulled his shield trick. Then Scotty would have pulled another trick. Then another ship would have shown up. Then Kirk would have been knocked out and Spock would have used the Corbomite maneuver. It would take 45 minutes and my eyes would be rolling up into my skull.

There is a severe dearth of good editing in Hollywood. Maybe it’s the video era; movies are rarely watched in one full sitting. Maybe it’s that no one cares or has the power. Maybe it’s the international market (action is the same in every language). But no one is willing to cut movies down to an appropriate length. And this is especially obvious with the long bloated action scenes that every movie seems to require. I swear, one of these days we’re going to get a version of Sense and Sensibility with a pointless and inconclusive gun battle in the middle.