Word: dyna
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Wrong. For the makers of many summer films, the storytelling art is passe. These talented fellows want to dream up worlds that can exist only in the cinema. Call their pictures dyna-movies, for they are dynamic rather than dramatic. They trade in sensation, in the jolts a moviegoer gets at seeing a villain's body blow up real good. Their impact is the sum of their special effects. And their tone is high facetiousness; the whole construct is an elaborate joke...
Most films offer the viewer one thing at a time to look at, one emotion to feel. A dyna-movie demands more; the eye must search every corner of the film frame for glancing gags. Look closely in the villain's lair in RoboCop 2 and find effigies of his patron saints: Jesus, Mother Teresa, Elvis, Oliver North. Listen hard to Gremlins 2 and catch witty details about zillionaire Daniel Clamp's cable empire. It includes 24-hour channels devoted to archery and laundry, and a movie channel featuring "Casablanca, but with color -- and a happier ending." Gremlins 2 should...
...their speed, technical wizardry, surface brilliance and cheerful cynicism, dyna-movies are the ideal art form for the MTV generation. Zapped for a decade by the lightning impulses of rock videos, inured to slaughter by campy slasher films, kids have become scarily sophisticated; they are connoisseurs of carnage. They know that in a blood ballet like Total Recall everybody gets killed but nobody gets hurt -- because the characters aren't human beings but ciphers, cyborgs, stunt people and stunted characters, no more real than the creatures vaporized in Nintendo games...
Even a pre-MTV adult can find the game exhilarating -- for about an hour. Then it runs out of gas or fizzles out, as Gremlins 2 pretends to and ultimately does. At the climax, when other movies are accelerating, a dyna- movie must slow down in a vain search for emotional heft. By the end, viewers may be exhausted from information overload. Instead of leaving the theater with a rosy glow or warm tears, dyna-moviegoers feel like a James Bond vodka martini. They have been shaken but not stirred...
...shortage of helicopters is easily detected and quickly cured. But the ultimate effects of McNamara's decisions to scrap projects such as the Air Force's Dyna-soar spacecraft and to phase out long-range heavy bombers, will not be fully measurable for years. McNamara has been spending $7 billion a year for research and development, far more than had been allocated previously; yet he is accused of killing more projects than he carries out. Ten years hence, the nuclear aircraft engine, which he abandoned, may prove to be a vital necessity...