Last weekend Maria and I watched Disney’s 1991 movie The Rocketeer, and it got me thinking. How has this genre of action flicks changed over the last 30ish years?
Set in 1938 Los Angeles, The Rocketeer follows the adventures of a MacGuffin, an advanced rocket pack designed and built by Howard Hughes. A group of gangsters try to steal the rocket pack and in the ensuing chase with the FBI, it falls into the hands into the hands of stunt pilot Cliff Secord. Cliff’s plane was shot down in the FBI shootout, leaving him without a source of income, so he chooses to “borrow” the rocket pack for his stunt flying. As a result, he becomes a target of the FBI, the gangsters, and a Hollywood star the gangsters are working for. Just to make the stakes that much higher, the Hollywood star is a closet fascist planning to give the rocket pack to Hitler.
The Rocketeer is indeed a superhero film, as the rocket pack is, for plot and genre purposes, no different than Tony Stark’s Iron Man suit. Probably the reason Cliff isn’t immediately obvious as a superhero is because he doesn’t have any special abilities besides being a pilot, and the rocket pack doesn’t give him any advantages over other people except as a convenient mode of transportation. And maybe that’s the movie’s strongest selling point. Action scenes consist of Cliff amateurishly blundering through brawls against equally amateurish opponents. Al most all of these “superhero” battles end inconclusively with one or both sides escaping. The Rocketeer is no Batman either, never shows any special cunning, and his plans consist of punching the first guy he sees in the face and never go much beyond that. Even in the climatic confrontation at the end of the movie, when he does in fact have a fair amount of time to prepare for, his “plan” was still shit. He survives it just through the dumb luck. Maybe it’s just me, but I think it’s more entertaining to watch a regular guy escape danger by the skin of his teeth than it is to watch a super human smash armies of harmless CGI monsters.
As for the movie’s MacGuffin, the rocket pack is a good one. Writing a good MacGuffin to drive the plot forward is more difficult than it looks. Perhaps the most famous MacGuffin in movie history, the Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett (see my post about him here) wrote as a joke. Characters harm, kill, and betray each other throughout the story, all assuming that the black bird is a crusader treasure made out of solid gold. But in the end it turns out to just be a worthless lump of lead. It’s the idealized dream of the Maltese Falcon that moved the plot forward, not the bird itself. A superhero MacGuffin needs to be powerful enough to plausibly motivate everyone to want it, but not so powerful the current owner becomes unbeatable. Case in point, Sauron’s ring in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings doesn’t make much sense if you think about it for more than one second. Everyone treats it as an all-powerful weapon, but Tolkien never bothered to explain why or how it’s a powerful weapon. The ring can turn you invisible and apparently does nothing else. Even the invisibility power is is unhelpful because the user immediately becomes visible to Sauron and his henchmen. The “all-powerful” ring seems to serve no purpose at all except to be the Deus ex Machina that kills Sauron. Which leads one to wonder how Sauron could have possibly been so careless to lose it in the first place.
MacGuffins tend to conform to gender roles and stereotypes. Boys find an external object that forces change within themselves. Girls find innate power within themselves. Often, the MacGuffin is somewhat literal. Luke Skywalker is given a lightsaber. Maria Kondorskaya describes Star Wars as a story about men who play with oblong objects that get bigger when you touch them, and she’s not wrong. It’s interesting, really. Skywalker comes of age after he turns on the lightsaber (then disengages his targeting computer and uses the force to shove his missile into a hole). King Arthur comes of age when he unsheathes Excalibur from the stone. Harry Potter comes of age when he flicks his wand for the first time. In Come and See, the man character wants to join the local partisans, but they won’t take him unless he comes with a weapon. So in a very phallic scene, he digs up a German carbine from an abandoned trench. At first glance the gun might not seem like a MacGuffin, but it is. If you pay close attention, the gun plays a key role in several crucial events throughout the film, despite the fact that the main character never kills anyone, and only even gets to fire it at the very end. The gun allows him to be accepted into the partisans. Later on he meets the local elder on his death bed who explains that the Germans saw him take the gun and massacred the village in retaliation. Then another group of partisans try to steal his gun and he refuses to let it go, causing them to relent and let him go on the party. And so on.
When it comes to girls, they tend to find an innate trait within themselves which compels everyone else to treat them differently. For example, Joan of Arc (both the real person and the fictional character) was chosen by God for her faith and purity. Even when screenwriters try to “defy gender norms” they still accidentally achieve the opposite and conform to gender norms. In Wonder Woman she steals the God Killer sword, believing it will give her special powers. But in the end, the sword turns out to be worthless and Wonder Woman finds out that she’s the God Killer, and had the power within herself this whole time. Really, I don’t think Wonder Woman is very smart. The other women on the island are killed by being stabbed and shot but she isn’t, which might have been a clue that she has abilities some would consider to be… unnatural. I also think that Wonder Woman should be canceled for being transphobic. She tried to be a man and failed, so went back to being a woman. Transphobia! Heresy!
Same with Rey in the Disney Star Wars films. She finds a lightsaber but it turns out to be irrelevant. She already had all the abilities she needs within herself and is more powerful than every other character.
As for the Rocketeer, perhaps the biggest difference between his movies and more recent entries into the superhero genre is length and pacing. The Rocketeer is a modest 108 minutes, and honestly feels much shorter. Compare that to Avengers: End Game, which clocks in at three goddamn hours. The Rocketeer’s action scenes might be so compelling and interesting because they are, simply, short and to the point. There is no plausible explanation for why modern blockbusters are consistently so much longer. More screentime means more money spent, which means less profit margin no matter how successful it is. Though many commentators have tried to explain why new movies are so much longer, I think it’s because modern Hollywood productions have lost the craftsmanship to put together a coherent, snappy story. All of Disney’s Star Wars entries were not only long, but left huge amounts of footage on the digital cutting room floor, which is just money flushed down the drain. Another reason why The Rocketeer can tell a complete story in 108 minutes and the new Avengers movies can’t is because of character actors. Cliff, his girlfriend, the mafia boss, the business tycoon, the sneering FBI agents, the arrogant actor/spy, are all recognizable and effective stereotypes. There’s no need for exhausting exposition explaining their personalities and backstories because everyone already knows them. We know how Eddie Valentine became a mob boss, how Cliff became a pilot, how Jenny became an aspiring actress, and it’s not even interesting to hear the stories and they’re completely unimportant.
That said, I wouldn’t rate The Rocketeer as a 10/10, and I mostly like it out of nostalgia. There are some problems, or at least qualities I would consider shallow. The movie is set in 1938 and it’s obvious why. There was a desire for 1930s aesthetics and to have nazis as villains, but as villains who could plausibly visit the USA as tourists. So it had to be 1938 and not later. Of course there’s nothing wrong with setting a necessary time period for the movie and that’s a necessary initial step for any story. It’s actually quite intriguing to get a picture of life and geopolitics in that moment and it is surreal for us now. In 1938, the Third Reich was just another country and Adolf Hitler was just another world leader. At this point they hadn’t, at least on the surface, done anything particularly bad. A German airship full of nazi agents could visit America unopposed, just like the Hindenburg (which this fictional airship was most obviously based on). The problem is that if you expect this setup to lead to some deeper insights or commentary, well, it doesn’t happen. The Rocketeer’s writers wanted the movie to end with a giant airship exploding. Who were people who were famous for building an airship that exploded? The Germans. How could American heroes realistically fight Germans? In the nazi era. But how could nazis show up in the USA unopposed? Set it in 1938. That, I think, was the entire thought process for this movie and I don’t think it went much deeper than that.
Incidentally, the Hindenburg could carry 72 passengers in the tiny little gondola at the bottom of the hydrogen envelope. So it is unclear how in The Rocketeer it was possible to smuggle an entire platoon of SS soldiers without anyone noticing. But again, it’s that kind of movie. It would be very cool for a platoon of nazis to spring up out of the ground for the final fight, so screenwriter guy had to invent a semi-plausible way for that to happen.
One last observation. The Rocketeer was an expensive movie for 1991, and it was a box office bomb. Part of the reason was that The Rocketeer was released roughly the same time as the Kevin Costner/Allan Rickman flick Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Incidentally, there’s a scene in The Rocketeer showing the nazi Hollywood actor and Cliff’s girlfriend filming a very cheesy and stereotypical Robin Hood style action sequence. I have to wonder if this was a passive aggressive way to make fun of the Kevin Costner movie while the two competing productions were ongoing.
When movies fail, lessons are learned. If you serve a customer an expensive dinner and he hates it and wants a refund, you know not to do that again. If you get all of your customers addicted to meth, they’ll keep coming back. In the 30 years since The Rocketeer hit theaters, lessons have been learned. If a movie is filled with bewildering CGI action and has enough LGBT references to make the news media happy (but brief enough to be cut out for the Chinese release), then it will almost certainly be a box office success. So those two strategies have been pursued to absurd extremes, at the expense of all other content.
And that, my friends, is why modern movies are trash.
Ian Kummer
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Ironically Bollywood films have got steadily shorter and snappier as Hollywood has got longer and drearier. Until the 1990s the average Bollywood film was 3½ hours long and had a formulaic cast of characters (for example, there was always a “comedy” subplot involving some kind of ethnic stereotype character, if set in a village there was always a cruel landlord and a wise old Muslim man called, for some reason, Uncle Rehman, the hero always had a widowed mum, and so on). That kind of film would only be fit for a laugh these days, assuming you could get anyone so sit through it.
Hollywood has long since killed off all originality and talent. Remade superzero claptrap is all it is good for anymore.
Awaara, Sangam, Mother India, Satyam Shivam Sundaram are absolute classics, i like some other 1970s-1980s movies, Nargis is on my top of favorite actresses, there was a Soviet-Indian movie with her. Most movies were indeed long, but cut as 2 episodes. Modern Bollywood is something I’m less aware of.
Shorter, 2 hours or usually less, more like Hollywood as it was 20 years ago, not better, but more oriented towards its target demographic. Lots of product placement, no more pure good/evil characters, no more plots throwing everything from drama to comedy into the mix. Criminals sometimes are protagonists as in Ocean’s Eleven and the like.