Action Films Give Me Anxiety: The Trailers to 'Spider-Man: No Way Home' Starring Tom Holland and 'The Matrix Resurrections' Starring Keanu Reeves Show Us Why!
Action films give me anxiety. I said it, and I meant it.
I am not arguing with the high-quality excellence of action films throughout time. James Bond is an icon. I am certain Spider-Man: No Way Home and The Matrix Resurrections are going to cinema-stoppers we will be talking about well beyond 2023. Yet, a film's intelligent and impressive composition are entirely separate from the main fact, the crux of this article, my MO in this piece: action movies give me anxiety.
Before I continue, I feel it is important to note my VERY liberal definition of an "action movie". For the purposes of this essay, the term action-movie umbrellas any movie where people get into any form of major, multi-scene, physical altercation. If someone threw a fight sequence into The Wizard of Oz where all of Oz came tumbling to the ground because Dorothy and the Scarecrow got into straight fist-to-cuffs, it would count. Why would it count? Because it would then give me an equal amount of anxiety.
Now to the heart of the matter: we've all seen this climactic fight scene. The town is in danger. An evil villain is threatening to destroy the town. The good guys step in, ready to battle it out and save the town.
But...they never actually save the town.
In the hero's quest to save the community (city, town, smurf village- it doesn't matter), they end up destroying THE ENTIRE THING! They burst through walls, they take buildings down, they decimate entire blocks. At that point, what are you even saving! You could have just let the villains take it all to the ground. Why are villains bad and good guys good? WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THESE MOVIES THEY DO THE SAME THING! The literal ONLY difference is that the good guys are ONLY destroying the town because the bad guys decided they were going to destroy the town. The good guys would LOVE to have not destroyed the town, but were peer pressured into it by the bad guys. OH FEW. WHAT HEROS!
Take this trailer from the upcoming film Spider-Man: No Way Home. Do you see the sheer AMOUNT of destruction in this trailer alone? Do you see what the good guys Spider-Man, played by Tom Holland, and Dr. Strange, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, are doing to prevent this destruction? LITERALLY nothing! While we do not see Spider-man or Dr. Strange personally destroy anything, we do see the entirety of the city *inhales* SINK INTO THE GROUND QUICKSAND STYLE!!! WHAT IS ONE TO DO FROM THERE!? Say the good guys get the city out of the quicksand hole, what then? Do you know how much infrastructural damage would be caused by the earth CAVING IN ON ITSELF? We are talking billions of dollars and hundreds of years in repairs.
Similarly on the how-are-they-going-to-fix-it train is this trailer for The Matrix Resurrections. Now, I understand that the entire thing behind the Matrix is that things aren't all real. Do you you know what is real? The stress I feel watching these people destroy buildings. People LIVE there. What happens to all of the people that are not part of your little fight? You have damaged countless livelihoods, blown up trains, shot through walls. The family next door is just trying to live out their uncomplicated days. Quite frankly, you all owe them an apology.
While I can rant and rave about the countless ways in which action movies stress me out, there is an easy fix to all of it. All I want is a clean up scene. That's it. Add a clean up scene, and I will be happy to attend a showing of your quite literally explosive film. If you show me how everything gets cleaned up, I will not have anything to complain about. The town will be saved, and we can hail the good guys as the heroes they are meant to be.
BETTER YET, why isn't someone's superpower (or just their really cool human skill) cleaning everything up after the fighting? Sure, they may not be super involved during the main action parts, but they would be the real saviors for the lay people living in the town. Honestly, they'd probably be my favorite characters.
Who knows! Maybe there is a clean-up character in Spider-man: No Way Home and The Matrix Resurrections. I guess we'll just have to see the movies to find out!
