Vidyoyo
The bad "V"
Good points. I suppose it's a result too of our own tension decreasing when we're three or four films in, realising the characters are probably going to live no matter what.Well, you’ve touched upon something there that I didn’t in my post, and I for one am grateful because I think that is a very elegant explanation of the anti-fantasy type movie argument that we see constantly revolving the debate circuit. I think it has become a very widely and over-used trope to say “you have to just suspend your disbelief, and let some things slide to enjoy these movies” because I think it does expose a laziness in their writing and production. I don’t think making a fantasy movie means that one has to abandon the laws of believability in terms of character actions and interactions with their environment. Yes one js creating a world in which the improbable is probable, but every created world has to have some grounding back in a framework of some rule construct.
It’s for example, why the Fast and Furious franchise was one completely abandoned by me. One expects characters to defy the usual laws of risk taking and fear by accomplishing ever increasing feats of peril, but they now seem to be immune to the laws of physics too and impervious to serious injury. This undermines the whole series because it was never an established rule framework that they had super powers; which is a borderline assumption you’d now have to make to accept their survival across myriad events in the recent instalments. It took the franchise from improbably to impossible and frankly makes it all ridiculous.
superhero movies have much greater latitude because you have characters imbued with clearly exposed supernatural powers but without clearly defined limits. That can be shaped to fit the story telling. Again, a somewhat lazy writing mechanism, but for me doesn’t necessarily ruin the immersion qualities of the movie in question. The improbability/impossibility is baked into the genre.
I'm dubbing it the Top Gear problem - when you start with some interesting situations but have to keep raising the stakes until it's just three middle-aged men pretending to be in desperate circumstances.