Blasterpiece

Rating: Null/10 (13 February 2014)

This was a perfectly exciting blockbuster when it came to, still is to some extent. We don't altogether escape formula, but there is mechanical efficiency that holds it. Its charm is a series of games, engrossing enough on their own, and then several pull backs to reveal larger schemes at play.
Next to that, nearly every set piece is memorable, from the Harlem provocation to the drive through Central Park to the subway and bank heist, each one is distinct. I like that it's all struck in the middle of a busy New York, we don't have the precise containment of the first Die Hard but chaotic mobilization.
Something else ticked my fancy though in this viewing.
Since then we've had Nolan introduce his new mechanics. This is a basic component of his Dark Knight: capricious villain and his games with civilians hanging in the balance, elaborate heist in plain sight that paralyzes a whole city, destroying a fortune to redress world balance via chaos. Nolan probably understood that sinking the gold would have made Simon that much more terrifying. His disappearance would have been the natural conclusion here, providing opportunity for a sequel with higher stakes, but the notion of a continuous film universe hadn't yet caught on. The whole last segment in the Canadian border feels tacky and forced, McClane in a phonebooth simply looks down and finds the vital clue.
What really struck me though, going past similarities and enhancements in the narrative, is that visually we have come pretty far in under twenty years. Nolan's mechanics, like him or not in a general view, appear that much more stunning in their ability to condense and communicate a complex fabric of events. Here they struggle with two anchors (games - heist, McClane in tunnel - Zeus in stadium, ship - school) and there's dead cinematic time hanging about in the transitions. Nolan masters at least three with ease, juggling much smaller packets of story.
The film does feels rumbling now, in part because it's all over the place, but also our viewing tools have evolved to enable us to parse story in a more rapid succession of these packets.
There's one of these here that may illustrate this for the reader, a single shot. This is right after Simon has phoned a radio station with news of having planted a bomb in one of the schools, now we're meant to see that the whole city is whipped in a frenzy as parents rush to take their kids. We could have a whole mess of shots, instead there is just one: cut to a convenience store where the news come on the radio, hearing this a panicked mother runs out of the store into the street.
One motion conveys a whole range of narrative, admirable economy and perfect conveyance of essence; a mother rushing out. It's a wholly ordinary shot in context of course, purely functional. But understanding the minute choreography entailed in this function, how to convey that storyrange you only need this one bit and the hidden possibilities therein, is a more exciting film school than learning about a historic Eisenstein.
This is one of the cinematic frontiers at this point. Fabric being chopped to smaller bits and these being not just action blurs but intelligible flows we can parse opens up a wholly new dimension to what is possible to do, the accelerating visual culture is expanding us in that direction. There should be a balance of how small these can be, an art of finding the right moments. But this is all ahead of us and remains to be known.