The phenomenal commercial success of Furious 7 has been attributed to the public’s curiosity in the recreation of its star, Paul Walker, who was killed in a car accident before completing the shoot. Of course, there are other factors, chiefly the thunderous special effects and the out-of-this-world stunts that unstoppably hammer the senses of the audience from beginning to end. Amazingly, in spite of their incredulity and absurdity, these senseless effects have become the most compelling and attractive elements in movies for today’s audience, who flock to cinemas seeking fleeting excitement rather than an engaging dramatic narrative that underpins the art of cinema. The question is: can we consider watching Furious 7, a cinematic experience?
Vision:
Cinema as an art is a specificity of vision, the vision of an artist -the director, who expresses his own thoughts, beliefs, ideas and emotions and engages with audiences’ sensibilities through the aesthetics of visual images. The director develops the screenplay, sometimes with a writer, and chooses his own cast and crew, whom he trusts in achieving his own vision, without the interference of a third party. This of course is not the way blockbusters, such as Furious 7, are made in Hollywood.
When I asked Furious 7’s director, James Wan, about the ambitions he had when he embarked on this project, he said: “The most important thing for me was satisfying the franchise’s fans and audience.” You hear these kind of statements from a baker or any other trader, whose goal is to fulfil the needs of his customers, not an artist who wishes to express himself through his art.
The truth is that the studio didn’t hire Wan to colour the film with his own vision or to reflect on his conception of the meaning of life, but because he had perfected the Hollywood formula in his horror movies, such as Insidious and The Conjuring, which yielded a very impressive box office figures. So all he needed to do was studying the previous Fast and Furious movies in order not to stray from the winning formula, because Hollywood is too wary of the inherited commercial risks of original ideas.
Wan had also to adhere to a screenplay that had been developed by studio writers, who receive their orders, not from the -mostly defunct- development department, but from the international marketing and publicity departments that care little for the artistic merit or integrity of the final product, concentrating instead on its potential commercial profitability in the increasingly dominant international markets, such as China and Russia, whose audiences are avariciously hungry for gratuitous violence, absurd action and special effects.
This shift in Hollywood filmmaking philosophy prompted its critics to argue that what Hollywood has been making in the last 3 decades is not cinema, but rather commercial products called movies. These movies are not helmed by auteurs, but made by groups of business executives, financiers, lawyers, publicists and marketers, who are ignorant in the art of cinema but excellent in the business of producing and selling commercial products, as they did with Furious 7, which, in spite of lacking vision and substance, has been a commercial miracle.
Substance:
In the early years of cinema, movies consisted of rudimentary scenes, like a train thundering forward or raging ocean waves or swarming crowds in a public gathering. But as the language of cinema evolved, filmmakers were able to tell stories by using actors, music, lighting, cuts in different size and of different angles, and editing to create a coherent narrative, driven by drama, suspense and thrill. All the new cinematic innovations were used to create complex characters who take the audience on a thrilling emotional journey as they endure challenging life experiences such as romance, war, crime…etc.
Of course, characters in movies can be fictitious, invented by the screenwriter or the director, and exist in an illusion of reality, but they are often drawn from the spectator’s reality and act like him in dealing with their challenges and solving their life problems, which makes it easier for the spectator to immerse himself into their world and empathise with them in their predicaments. These stories inflame emotions, provoke thoughts and enlighten the minds, and linger forever.
In contrast, Furious 7 lacks any meaningful substance or compelling characters to emotionally connect with. Instead one leaves the theatre exhausted and indifferent to the chaos that has been witnessed. Obviously, the goal of the film was not telling a story or exploring characters, but rather fleetingly exciting the audience with gratuitous digitally-enhanced action sequences.
Undeniably, cinema creates fake realities, but each reality should be based on some logical rules in order to be accepted by the spectator, and that’s what is frustratingly missing in Furious 7, which features stunts, created by computers, that defy all the rules of logic and physics, stretching the limits of plausibility beyond human acceptability, such as the head-on crash of two speeding cars, rendering them into a twisted wreckage, yet the drivers emerge unscathed and ready for a fight, or the car that tumbles from a precipice of a cliff down a steep valley, disintegrating into metal pieces yet its flesh-made passengers leap out of it in perfect physical condition as if they had just come out of a make-up session. It seems that the filmmakers were so tempted by the infinite possibilities of effects that computers can provide that they lost interest in the logic and credibility.
I am not against the fantastic, but they have to reflect the film’s reality and conform to the laws that underpin it. For instance, it’s not unreasonable to see the application of laser swords in Star Wars battles, because their use is congruent with the space reality that the director created. But the characters of Furious 7 are earthlings made of flesh and blood, not of unbreakable metal, hence it becomes harder to empathise with them when you strip them of their humanity. Therefore, instead of embarking on an emotional journey with the film’s characters, the spectator’s mind is overwhelmed by the racing cars that survive all calamities and sometime fly in the air, without even having wings.
Evidently, the purpose of these effects is not serving the film’s narrative or deepening its characters, but numbing the spectator with inane entertainment, and that was what Vin Diesel, the star and producer of the film, confirmed to me. “Our goal in this film is to innovate the newest and most complex special effects in order to please our fans.”
The Form:
As mentioned earlier, the director utilises a variety of visual tools, such as the size and angle of the shot, editing and music score, to create and enhance the drama in his movie. Sometimes, he extends the shot to give the characters time to reflect or do a seemingly mundane but revealing action in his own environment, giving the spectator the chance to connect and empathise with him. For instance, the long shot in Stanley Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory” in which the commander inspects his soldiers in their trenches on the front, introduces the commander to the audience through his reactions and the environment that he had to deal with. On the other hand, We can’t connect with the commander in Michael Bay’s “Pearl Harbor” when he arrives to inspect the Japanese bombardment damage because the director cuts too fast for the sake of the fleeting sensationalism, which has become the norm in the current Hollywood movies.
Furious 7 abandons the principles of visual drama and relies on the constant movement at a breathless pace, igniting temporary sensation rather than emotions and engagement, leaving the audience with vague memory of having been briefly excited rather than the enduring contentment of scenes playing again and again in one’s head.
Hollywood:
Hollywood stands accused, by its critics, of sacrificing the art of cinema for commercial profits, deculturation of movies and the casting away of all manner of dramatic cunning laboriously built up over decades. This is not surprising, because Hollywood is not run by filmmakers but by business people, who answer to their investors in Wall Street. “My job is to keep my company profitable and ensure that my employees provide food to their families. I am a businessman, not an artist,” a studio boss tells me. His statement makes a lot of sense. Then is it right to blame Hollywood for the degradation of cinema?
Hollywood executives’ answer has invariably been: “We just fulfill the public need. As long as there is demand for our movies, we will continue to make them.” Granted, but some charge Hollywood with conditioning the young generation to find the absence of emotions pleasurable by constantly hammering their sensory systems with special effects. But one must not forget the impact of the technology and the internet that has given rise to a new generation that wants everything instantaneously without waiting. This generation demands constant excitement and is easily bored by reflection and contemplation. Will they ever develop a taste for narrative, for character, for suspense, for acting, for irony for wit, for drama? Isn’t it possible that they will be so hooked on sensation that anything without extreme actions and fantasy will just seem lifeless and dead to them?
So it seems that humanity, in its entirety, is regressing and becoming possessed by the machines that provides our needs with astonishing efficiency and speed, whether it’s supplying information via internet searches or producing sensational special effects in Hollywood movies.
Solution:
“If you want substance storytelling then go TV,” a studio executive tells me. Indeed, with their movies failing to compete with Hollywood blockbusters in cinema theatres, many of the great directors and screenwriters have moved to working on TV shows, where they find a creative environment, free of the constraints of Hollywood’s filmmaking. So will TV replace cinema for visual storytelling, and will the cinema theatres transform into special effects venues?