A Lot of Hokum

Has fantasy gone too far? In the 2008 adaptation of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (as opposed to the wondeful 1959 version with James Mason), the main characters fall through a hole when the floor collapses beneath them; all screaming in terror, they suddenly stop in unison to allow star Brendan Fraser to exclaim: ‘hey, we’re still falling!’ Or how about The Lord of the Rings where Orlando Bloom as elf Legolas climbs aboard a moving elephant, fights its passengers and slides down the trunk? Or there’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls in which Harrison Ford escapes the explosion of a nuclear bomb by shutting himself in a refrigerator, which is then exploded into the air during the blast and lands safely away from any chance of being incinerated. This is not to mention the latest additions to the Star Wars franchise and comic book adaptations such as Spider Man and Iron Man. The development of CGI special effects means that literally anything, no matter how fantastical or extreme, is possible. But are filmakers now ignoring the fact that a use of restraint in both plot and what we see on screen might work more effectively? Is it time, perversely in an age of so much technological advancement, to ask filmmakers to take a step back or should we just relax and enjoy the hokum?

Right from the start filmmakers recognised that part of what kept audiences coming to the movie was the promise of showing them something they had never seen before. The history of special effects is practically as old as the history of movies, with Georges Melie’s ‘stop trick’ (an object is filmed, the camera is turned off, the object is removed, the camera turned back on; it seems that the object has disappeared) developed as early as 1896. It is that promise of the combination of thriller, mystery and spectacle, which if got right, can make the adventure genre so irresistible. As Cecil B. DeMille once asked of his writers: ‘what would fascinate Eskimos in their igloos, harness harassed housewives, rivet restless children?’

So anything goes…right? Speaking about the BBC series Bonekickers, about a group of mystery solving crime fighting archaeologists, on Newsnight Review recently, academic and critic John Mullan made this point: ‘Hokum has to have its own logic, don’t you think?’ In other words, like any genre it has its own rules, its own set of narrative conventions. You can play with these rules by all means; subvert them as much as you wish. But if you break them, then realise that you run the risk that the project will fail. Mullan went on to say: ‘I think hokum can be fine, but they (ie, the programme makers) have to take it seriously while they’re doing it.’ I take this to mean that you give the subject - whatever the art form - the respect it deserves. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when Harrison Ford jumps from a horse on to a tank, falls of it, and hangs on to the side and is almost driven into a cliff wall, it may be ludicrous, but it is also somehow real. Spielberg and his team manage to make the audience feel the sense of danger inherent in the scene. In Indiana Jones and Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls, Ford’s heir apparent Shia LaBeouf catches up with a jeep chase by swinging through the jungle on vines in a sequence inspired by the Johnny Weismuller Tarzan films. The effect could not have been achieved in the former film, made twenty years before. But for all it’s CGI brilliance, it feels cartoonish; we may enjoy the moment, smile at it, but it’s closer to a parody of the genre and robbed of the tension greater realism might have given it. But, with the financial rewards of CGI so spectacular, if there is a lesson, it doesn't look like anyone will be learning it any time soon.