Whatever happened to building to the big ending?

Rating: Null/10 (16 May 2004)

Whatever happened to building to the big ending?
I watched `North By Northwest' a week ago, a film that was generally regarded as the best `action thriller' ever made to that point, (1959). It has, basically, three action scenes. The first is a semi-comical trip down a highway after the bad guys have kidnapped Cary Grant, drugged him up and put him in a car so he will crash and die. That comes about 15 minutes into the film. Most of an hour later comes the famous `Crop duster scene' where an innocent looking plane tries to do Cary in by clipping him with it's wings, machine gunning him and then fertilizing him to death before crashing in a ball of flame. Then, about half hour later, we get the famous escape over Mount Rushmore, where they wind up clinging to George Washington's nose. The rest of the film is a cat and mouse game between Cary and the bad guys and a romance between him and Eva Marie Saint. The whole thing doesn't make much sense but its fun and entertaining nonetheless. Still, to the kind of audience `Van Helsing' was created for, it must seem like pretty tame stuff.
Van Helsing is undoubtedly the first of many films trying to clone `Lord of the Rings' with its huge computer generated monsters and mass battle scenes. Like LOR, the special effects are amazing. But like LOR, the whole movie seems an exercise in special effects, as if that's all the audience came to see so that's what we will show them. There are perhaps a dozen action sequences in this picture, one right after the other, each one spectacular enough to have been the climax of a perfectly good action film. But because they are all so spectacular, their cumulative effect is to make each scene less amazing and less enjoyable. The lack of build up to them and the lack of character development to give them depth makes them less meaningful. It's like reading a comic book for two hours. When at the end, we realize how much Van Helsing has grown to love Anna, we wonder when he ever had time to do that between all the chases and battles with monsters.

Still, I like this picture better than Lord of the Rings because it doesn't take itself so seriously. LOR was like a Wagnerian Opera. This film comes off as pure adventure because the characters have a sense of adventure and a sense of humor, if a sardonic one. But I would have liked it a lot better if it concentrated on developing character and atmosphere and saved the fireworks for the end.
In commenting on another action film I observed that the modern action film has become what the old fashioned Hollywood musical used to be. Whereas the musical used a slight plot to draw together the musical sequences, the modern action film does the same for action sequences. We used to see Fred and Ginger dance. Now we see stuntmen and CGI creations fight. But now it seems we have gone past even that to what amounts to a `clip show', virtually eliminating the plot, except for some shouted exposition, and giving us simply one breathless sequence after another. It all gets to be a little too much after a while. And there just isn't enough meat on the bones.
Those few action sequences in North by Northwest meant more because the people in them mattered to us. Now, who cares?