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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   2713 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 6, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Last week @Lizzardspawn asked why none of the sequels to the first two Terminator or Predator movies have been any good. Having only seen the first Predator and Terminators 1 and 2, I wasn't really in a position to comment on the inferiority of the sequels, but offered my two cents anyway based on my secondhand knowledge of Terminators 3-6. This got me thinking about Terminator 2 and I ended up reading the entire Wikipedia article (and the sub-article dedicated specifically to its special effects). Last Friday we sat down to watch a torrented version of the rerelease for Blu-ray which includes all of the cut scenes. It still looks great, although annoyingly there were a few points in the first half of the movie in which the colour grading would change dramatically in consecutive shots (I don't mean consecutive scenes: I mean consecutive shots in the same location), which was distracting and a rather glaring oversight for a rerelease apparently overseen by Cameron himself. It also ends with the corny, sentimental ending I criticised last week, rather than the "open road" ending from the theatrical release. But all that aside, the film still holds up, many of the visual effects still look positively jaw-dropping thirty-five years later, and the film is a true landmark in action films.

This got me thinking about my favourite action films, in no particular order:

  • Terminator 2: As above.
  • The Matrix: Perhaps the only film that can rival Terminator 2 for innovation in visual effects, and a spellbinding sci-fi romp on top of that.
  • Die Hard: my brother and I have a tradition of watching this every Christmas, to the point that I daresay I could probably recite the entire film from memory with some prompting. Nothing beats bellowing "no more table!" in a thick Teutonic accent with a glass of Bailey's.
  • The Rock: probably my single favourite action film ever. Whatever one might think of Michael Bay's "chaos cinema" style more broadly, it works here. Nicolas Cage's goofiness had not yet veered into outright self-parody, Sean Connery remained as wryly charismatic in his sixties as peak Bond, and Ed Harris lends palpable gravitas to an anti-villain whose motivation is more sympathetic than any of the protagonists' (it's amazing to me that Harris never served: he's completely convincing as a military man). It's an action film in which violence is deployed both for cathartic escapism and for heart-rending pathos (the scene in which the SEAL team is gunned down in the shower room is a moving audio-visual statement on the pointlessness of war), without any consequent feeling of tonal dissonance. It's an unusually cerebral and literate action film which offers thought-provoking meditations on the morality of American military adventurism, while still finding the time to have fun and give us great lines like "Your besht? Loshers always whine about their besht. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen."
  • Speed: I was positively obsessed with this film as a small child, a testament to the power of raw sound and image to overpower one's critical thinking faculties. Even ignoring the film's brazen disregard for the laws of physics, one could fill a book with the plot points that don't make a lick of sense or are dependent on contrived coincidences – and yet, in the moment, one simply doesn't care. Probably Keanu Reeves's best performance ever (admittedly not a terribly high bar to clear), his chemistry with Sandra Bullock* is believable and irresistible, Dennis Hopper offers perhaps the most entertaining action-movie villain since Hans Gruber, and the soundtrack is memorable, exciting and emotive.
  • Saving Private Ryan: More of a war film than an action film proper, although its impact on the genre is impossible to dispute. Even people who don't like the film as a whole will concede that its depiction of the Omaha beach landing set the tone for how action movies would look, sound and feel for decades afterwards.
  • The Fugitive: I only watched this film quite recently, but it deserves its place in the canon of action-thriller films for grown-ups. On a second watch I was struck by how vacant and anonymous Harrison Ford's leading man turn is: Tommy Lee Jones is the film's real protagonist, and steals every scene he's in.
  • Total Recall: As discussed here. The film which best encapsulates Philip K. Dick's entire aesthetic, and the best Paul Verhoeven film I've seen (I'm curious about Starship Trooopers and Showgirls).
  • Heat: Like Saving Private Ryan a marginal example, and more of a crime thriller than an action film. In a runtime of nearly three hours, it only contains two or three real action setpieces, but one of those happens to be one of the most tense, nerve-wracking and explosive shootouts in cinematic history, so it would be remiss of me not to include it.
  • Predator: Right up there with Terminator 2 as far as action/sci-fi goes, and I like that it's not as self-serious in tone.

Are there any recurring patterns here? Nostalgia obviously plays a major role: several of these films (Speed, The Rock, Terminator 2) were films I watched repeatedly on VHS as a child. Relatedly, there are no entries from this century (excepting the marginal case of The Matrix Reloaded, which I'm counting under The Matrix). Every film is also American: I've heard great things about Asian action cinema, but both times I tried watching Hard-Boiled I turned it off about half an hour in.

What would you say your favourite action films are? Are there non-American action films that I really must see? Are there any from this century that I really ought to check out? (Before anyone mentions John Wick: I will concede that its action sequences are expertly choreographed and filmed, but when I watched it a few years ago I came away feeling distinctly underwhelmed, finding it stylistically confused and at odds with itself.)

*Rumour has it that none other than Ellen deGeneres was the frontrunner for the role. I feel quite confident that, had they gone with this, it would have derailed the entire film.

Predator

The problem with Predator is that they want to expand the lore but went with the "planet of hats" trope where they are a race of hunters.

So when they try to show anything more than the Predator hunting it comes off as lazy and unsatisfying writing.

It'd be better if they started dropping hints that the ones we see are aristocratic safari hunters engaged in illegal poaching. "Dutch the Human" actually has a big fandom on their homeworld for killing one.

Make a movie where a group of Predators comes to earth, then mid movie the authorities show up to try to arrest them, and then the humans are stuck in the middle of the unexplained chaos.

The Terminator series has a similar problem. You can keep going with humanity vs Skynet, but the terminators start feeling shoehorned in. Skynet should have more than one trick.

In general action movies suffered from competition with video games. As the home gaming experience got better movies couldn't compete with the over the top action experience.

This was exacerbated by a push to strictly enforce R ratings and limit the marketing of R films. The fun gunplay and boobs films stopped being made. They became serious adult films or nerfed PG-13 adventures.

The other problem is that in the CGI age filmmakers became convinced that everything had to be frame perfect. But no one who is enjoying a movie is actually going to care about minor visual problems you can see in slow motion. Schwarzenegger movies are a great example of this. In Commando stuntmen are launched into the air when he throws grenades and you can see the catapults launching them if you look closely. In T2 you can clearly tell stunt doubles are doing the bike scenes if you look closely. No one cared.

Hollywood was always the king of big budget action spectacles and they are easy to dub into a new language. Other countries couldn't really compete directly so they went with things with more local flavour. Hong Kong does good action scenes but there are usually some plot points that are harder to understand as a westerner. China has been making some patriotic action movies lately that with some over the top depictions of Americans that end up being hilarious.

I'm curious about Starship Trooopers and Showgirls

Lindsay Ellis did a great review of Showgirls.

Starship Troopers is actually very interesting from a CW standpoint. Verhoven grew up in Nazi occupied Netherlands. He always had a guilty soft spot for the Nazi propaganda aesthetic. After Showgirls bombed he went to the studio to pitch an idea about fascist humans fighting communist bugs. The studio thought it sounded like Starship Troopers and got the rights to Starship Troopers. Verhoven tried to read the book, didn't like it or finish it, and let his screenwriter work on adapting it.

As a result there's a big split where the left thinks that the humans are clearly supposed to be fascist. But the actual movie depicts a functional society with suffrage limited to those who complete military service.

I kind of think of Starship Troopers in the same vein as Fight Club. They are both obviously parodies, and as a matter of actual fact are both intended to be parodies, but accidentally make strong enough points (or present them convincingly enough) in a few respects that some people will watch them and interpret them straight anyways. I would say more but this is the Fun thread :)

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