Karl Puschmann: Special effects losing their shine

The mutant Quicksilver delivers genuine special effects action in X-Men: Days of Future Past.

Opinion

All those big bright movie explosions ... gawd, aren’t they boring

Can we start calling them "boring effects" yet? Because what once made effects so special is now common-place. The 'splosions may be getting 'splodier, smearing the screen with an improbable whirr of brightly coloured nonsense, but the end result of all this frenetically frantic action is a snoozefest.

Who ever knew excitement could be so boring? Big budget blockbusters are totally my bag, but lately it feels like story is being written around set-piece. And that's not the right way to go about things.

Story should trump spectacle. Every time. But these impossibly overthunk action sequences are becoming more prevalent and - more worryingly - much more time-consuming.

My gawd do these scenes drag. I can't be the only person who yawned my way through the interminably long Battle of Knowhere in Guardians of the Galaxy. Or who checked my watch while Tom Cruise dive-rolled his way through the endless corridors of the Louvre in Edge of Tomorrow. Or who willed Jack Ryan to run a bit faster through the streets of Moscow as he chased after that ticking bomb.

Don't get me wrong. These are all enjoyable films. I'm just saying that a little restraint and some judicious editing would go a long way. If every scene is special, none of them are. And that's where it's starting to feel like we're at - breathless excitement giving way to exhausted tedium.

If it's not the final act of a film, we know that the good guy is going to escape the bad guy's clutches, and we know each individual member of our merry band of heroes is essentially indestructible. The stakes may be rising but we know no one's in any real danger. If they were, well, we wouldn't have a film.

It's the film-maker's job to create this tension and propel the story. But character development and real menace are being replaced with never-ending, special effect-laden set pieces. It's not that they're bad. It's that they're too damned long. Hell, great as it was, GoG was practically all set-piece.

Shortening these sequences isn't going to make special effects special again either. The only thing that is - the only thing that can - is imagination.

Finding creative uses for the computers rather than just pumping up the amount of 'splosions lighting up the screen at any one time.

For my money the most spectacular special effect sequence of the year is in X-Men: Days of Future Past.

It takes place in a kitchen and lasts a mere two minutes. It pops up unexpectedly and replaces the usual bombastic action score with an acoustic folk ballad.

Working as an update of the famed "bullet time" effect from The Matrix movies, the sequence shows time from the perspective of the mutant Quicksilver as he tears around the baddies at impossible speed and messes with them in increasingly humorous ways.

The scene is the polar opposite of special effects bloat. It's quiet, subtle, brief, visually astounding and something most action sequences aren't these days; memorable.

In a movie crammed with fight scenes, shoot-outs and dazzling computer work, it was instead this soft, hushed character scene that had everyone buzzing.

It was, in a word, special. When was the last time you could say that about an effect?