Buster Keaton clasps to the cattle guard of a speeding locomotive, one small slip away from falling beneath the wheels. The year is 1927, and the actor is no stranger to risking life and limb for a production: he’s already tempted death by scrambling along the side of the engine to reach his precarious position.
80-odd years later, the world’s biggest – and most profitable – action star hangs on the side-door of an enormous airplane taxiing for take-off somewhere in the UK. He might be firmly held to the chassis by a safety harness, but at this speed, even a small rock could cause a severe injury as he is buffered by the winds at an altitude of 5,000 ft.
Filmmaking has changed a huge amount in the time between Keaton’s locomotive escapades in The General and Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation plane stunt. And, despite nostalgia-driven claims to the contrary, much of it is for the better. Gone are the lax regulations that allowed hapless extras and stuntmen to be severely injured, and even killed, in poorly thought-through set-pieces. Just one year after The General, three extras were killed when the makers of Noah’s Ark concluded that the best way to film a biblical flood was to actually simulate one. Compared to last year’s Noah, which portrayed a full apocalyptic deluge whilst barely getting the actors wet, the change is remarkable. However, even the most ardent lovers of blockbuster cinema must admit that the CGI era has left an element of risk – and reality – missing from our biggest movies.
George Lucas’ Star Wars prequels showed that the limitations of physical filmmaking could be easily ironed out through elaborate visual design work. Regardless of fans’ opinions of those films, they were immensely successful – and Hollywood has rarely looked back since. Take Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth films: the contrast between The Lord of the Rings Trilogy – where the production was epic in scope, with film crews scaling mountains, constructing cities on location and actors falling from horses – and The Hobbit Trilogy is stark. Physical production and physical prop-making were replaced by an over-reliance on green screen and computer technology, and the film suffered for it: it looked false, cheap and cartoonish. Even the actors weren’t pleased, with the extensive green screen work driving an isolated Ian McKellen to tears.
Take Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth films: the contrast between The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and The Hobbit Trilogy is stark.
Throughout the 2000s, only a handful of film series kept things old fashioned. Christopher Nolan has consistently combined scale with physical immediacy in his films. The Bourne series too kept its focus grounded, even though the visceral style of that series drew criticism for its lack of polish. The majority of tentpole franchises however, threw themselves into new CGI worlds with inconsistent results.
It is this CGI-reliant style of filmmaking that two of the best-received action films of 2015, Mad Max: Fury Road and Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, have rebelled against. By reminding audiences that a motorbike chase at 200mph is as thrilling as an extravagantly-crafted CGI battle of thousands, they have opened the door for film-makers to combine the physicality of Buster Keaton’s stunts with the endless possibilities of computer-generated imagery.
The first of these, Mad Max: Fury Road, is a perfect example of how effective this pairing can be. The world-building is exquisite and far beyond what would have been possible during production of the original trilogy in the 1970s and 80s. The post-apocalyptic landscape is impressive, and daunting, and ravaged by eye-popping CGI sandstorms. And yet, thanks to an emphasis on physical props and stunts, the film manages to keep things believable (that’s saying something for a film with a guitar-shredding ghoul on the back of an amp-stacked monster truck); actors hang from speeding vehicles and the audience feels every single impact and explosion. The structure itself even harks back to the black-and-white era with its extended chase plot owing a huge debt to John Ford’s 1939 western, Stagecoach.
On first glance it would seem that the sheer insanity of Fury Road has little in common with the comparatively restrained Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation – which, plane stunts aside, marks an apparent attempt to reign in the excesses of previous entries in the series. However, Rogue Nation’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, appears just as intent as George Miller on keeping the action real, and uses CGI to embellish, not dominate, set pieces. In this sense, Rogue Nation is defiantly old-fashioned. Only one scene contains extensive, obvious CGI (a mid-heist underwater set piece, which at least includes some physical stunt-work from Cruise) and the climax in particular takes on the paranoid claustrophobia of early-Cold War spy thrillers as Cruise and his team are pursued through shadowy European alleyways, defending themselves in vicious hand-to-hand combat. Through this approach, it improves upon its predecessor 2014’s Ghost Protocol, which – despite impressive early thrills – resorted to typical blockbuster extravagance for its final act. Rogue Nation’s refusal to do so displays an admirable determination not to pander to audiences or the studio model of a successful blockbuster.
The gambles of both Fury Road and Rogue Nation have paid off. By reminding us that many of cinema’s greatest thrills were small-scale, they have shown that modern visual effects can be most effective bolstering – rather than replacing – physical filmmaking, and that this approach can be successful at the box office. With any luck, the success of these films will encourage studios to finance a new wave of physical filmmakers – filmmakers willing to test their imagination in the chaos of a movie set, rather than the safety of a CGI studio.
Peter Brearley
Image: Paramount Pictures