ADVENTURE FILMS
I don’t watch adventure movies, in fact I rarely watch a film of any kind, but on my computer screen I see the ads for adventure films in which all kinds of violent things happen with characters in odd medieval costumes swooping through the sky on dragons and skewering each other with lances or blasting each other with strange weapons. But I have no desire to watch these movies. Oddly, the awful violence the dragon riders are enduring doesn’t seem dangerous at all.
But I have looked at two of the adventure films on line that Apple has made in 3D for the Vision Pro. The first shows a young woman on a high wire balancing her way across the 3000 foot drop into a fjord, the second one just came out. The second one is about a sport of parkour and shows young men leaping from rooftop to rooftop in Paris. The views of Paris are terrific, but leaping from rooftop to rooftop in 3D scares me.
I’ve begun looking at the high wire movie several times but when she gets to the middle of the swaying wire, balancing with her arms outstretched, 3000 feet up, a very serious look on her face, I have to hit pause and then I shift out of the film and look at something else.
The same thing happened with the 3D Parkour film today. Three very athletic young men display their talents leaping from building to building, but when they get themselves ready to leap across a 15 foot gap down from one building to another with a hundred foot drop below them I exit the film. I can’t bear the suspense. The danger seems overwhelming.
Unlike the swooping dragon films which depend on fear for their effect, these 3D films of actual people risking terrible injury or death are too unbearably real and I have to turn them off. The 3D effect and my closeness to the screen on which I see these risky attempts greatly enhances the feeling of reality. I know things will turn out all right so I keep trying, again and again, to keep my eyes open and watch, but I simply can’t get past the middle of the film before turning away and exiting the film.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 