It’s become accepted wisdom that the Era of the Blockbuster, which began with the release of Jaws in the summer of 1975 and has continued unabated to this day, has been a disaster for the mainstream American cinema. The possibility of producing monster hits that will, in turn, spawn monster sequels and theme-park rides and video games and ringtones and who knows what else has spelled doom for smaller, more personal, studio-made movies–the kinds of emotionally resonant movies that helped make the cinema the dominant art form of the 20th century.
Now that the era has entered its fourth decade, it’s fair to say that the Blockbuster has become a genre unto itself. That means it has its own rules, its own distinct style, its own method of storytelling, and its own quirks and foibles.
The Blockbuster invariably features a villain who’s vastly more amusing, entertaining, and inspiring than the bland hero; a storyline that, despite budgets of hundreds of millions in production costs, resembles nothing so much as a mannequin on which to drape special-effects sequences like bolts of cloth; a gasp-inducing depiction of death and destruction that destroys thousands or even millions of people but is not really meant to discomfit in any way; and a setting that leans heavily on the fantastic.
Every Blockbuster, like every great magician, aims to show its audience a trick never before seen that will be so awe-inspiring it will cause viewers to want to see the film again just to get another glimpse at it. For the new Superman Returns, director Bryan Singer came up with an inspired visual gimmick to test just how bullet-retardant the Man of Steel really might be. A bullet shot from a machine gun aimed directly at Superman’s eye harmlessly knocks on his obsidian iris, and then simply falls to the ground. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the total cost of that effect and the 45-second scene around it was $2.3 million.
Despite the obscene expense, this is a witty and unexpected moment, and it and other Blockbuster moments like it prove that the genre hasn’t entirely destroyed Hollywood. In Spider-Man 2, the hassled Peter Parker, reduced to hauling pizzas around New York to pay his rent, despite possessing arachnid superpowers, desperately uses his Spider-Man skills to try and make a delivery under the allotted 30 minutes–and still doesn’t make it in time. That scene is as well conceived and executed as a bit of Golden Age Hollywood comedy.
The same can be said of Johnny Depp’s turn as Jack Sparrow, the Groucho Marx of the West Indies, in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Sparrow is one of the great comic creations in the history of the cinema, and filmgoers around the world have now twice greeted his arrival with a joyous parade. Depp took a well-written character and unleashed a crazed originality upon it.
“I imagined those pirates out in the open sea with extreme heat, no escape from the sun and humidity,” he said in a recent interview, “so I thought it would be interesting to jack up a sauna pretty good and see how long I could take it. I cranked it up to, like, 240 degrees. I was cooking. That degree of heat makes you sort of move involuntarily. That’s where all of Captain Jack’s jerky movements come from.”
Depp had signed on to do a movie based on a Disneyland ride for kids, a film his costar Keira Knightley has said “we all thought was going to be s– and tank.” But largely because Depp committed himself so deeply to this job for a paycheck, it turned into something unexpected and special. The second Pirates offers few unexpected joys, but it, too, has been lovingly crafted and thought-out, and the seriousness with which its creative team took the challenge of fashioning a memorable follow-up to the original justifies the unprecedented torrents of money that have rained down on them since the sequel opened more than a week ago.
In recent years, the Blockbuster has taken a surprising turn. Filmmakers who grew up in the Blockbuster Era– like Superman Returns‘ Singer, Spider-Man‘s Sam Raimi, Gore Verbinski of Pirates, Christopher Nolan of Batman Begins, and Peter Jackson of King Kong–have sought to put their own personal stamp on the genre just as directors of the 1960s and ’70s did with the classic genres of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Their Blockbusters are still corporate behemoths, funded lavishly so that they could not only pay for themselves but also create ancillary streams of cash for years to come.
Still, these are more heartfelt creations than the Blockbusters that preceded them, whose directors and writers are trying to evoke more complicated emotions than simply the exhilaration that comes at the end of a rollercoaster. For most adult moviegoers, they are not fulfilling fare because they do not tell stories about the world in which we live. But maybe the teenage boys for whom they are primarily intended are getting a better sense these days of what things movies can do besides showing aliens blowing up things.
John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
