There is this thing called "first person view." Essentially the idea is that you get to see what a character sees. In literature, this is referred to as first person limited. As you read, you see what the main character sees and follow what that character is thinking. In video games, you get this POV a lot in shooters, so you can see exactly what you're shooting at. In movies, this view didn't used to be used much. Sometimes in epics you would see the love interests in the end staring out over a balcony at a wide expanse of mountains or a town and the camera would wrap around as though you could see what they were seeing and then the words "The End" would fade in and out to black. While this is a first person view, it's still a wide angle shot.
First person is useful for a number of things. As I said, in video games, it allows you to see what you're shooting at. In literature, it narrows the scope of the story for the reader until the end when you get that punch in the gut that makes you see the whole story from some other character's point of view. You identify with the character. You're in touch with the action. It feels like it's about you. It creates a sense of urgency.
In the year of someone's lord, nineteen hundred and ninety eight, a breakthrough war film titled Saving Private Ryan emerged upon the silver screen. The film made waves for it's first person views during battles in WWII. It made people nauseous. It captured the urgency of battle. It made people see the horror of war up close and far too personal. It wasn't a story about glory and honour. It was a story about duty and necessity, a twist on the usual war epic.
Since then, action directors have been latching on to first person view like crack. They're addicted and there needs to be an intervention. It's destroying the quality of movies.
Exhibit A: Quantum of Solace, the new Bond picture. The film, as most action films do now, makes pretty constant use of the first person view, or at the very least, the extreme close up. In the opening sequence, Bond is being chased by some cars. I'm not sure how many cars, exactly. Only that they were black. The scene makes many frequent cuts from one angle to another, some of them less than a second long. There are some crashes and guns firing and an explosion or two. None of the shots takes more than five seconds, I'd wager, many of them very close, with a narrow field of view despite the wide screen. By the end of the scene, all I'm left knowing is that Bond has somehow survived.
Shortly after that in the second chase scene, this time with Bond in hot pursuit, pretty much the same thing happens. There are a lot of very short shots, a close up of a hand pulling on something, flashes and crashes and flying glass coming from nowhere in particular. Interrupt that with a John Woo fight hanging from ropes for fifteen to twenty seconds. Then back to the crashing and flying and close ups of arms and guns and broken glass not doing anything in particular - or at least not doing anything in particular because we can't see what those things are attached to due to the extreme close ups and first person view. In the end, Bond kills the guy. To be perfectly honest, I'm not even sure who he was chasing as the the shots were short and close up that I never got to see the face. It's only afterward that the name is said to confirm my suspicion on that one, and that's only because I didn't know who the other character in the room was.
The movie pretty much carries on that way. Sure, there's a story that's a kind of flimsy. There are touching moments of male bonding (no pun intended). There is emotion and sympathy and empathy. There are chases on foot, in planes, in cars, in boats (a boat chase? how often does that happen in real life? You know why? Because boats are slow). There are shootouts and explosions and women and martinis. The typical Bondian fare served up with a dash of bitter darkness. All in all, it's not a bad movie. But it does suffer from that short shot close up and first person point of view. Much of the time it's impossible to tell what the hell is going on as though you're expected to just accept the mindless action on screen as being entertainment in itself.
But it's not. The action needs to serve the story. And while the action in Quantum of Solace serves to advance the plot, it doesn't serve to entertain. So my plea to Hollywood directors is simply this: bring back the wide angle shot. That good old panoramic view lets viewers see the action in all it's glory. They know which character is doing what without the need to make one second shots. They capture the scenery and a sense of scope. It is one thing to show the action. It's another to show the context in which the action happens.
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