Screen action has come a long way since the Lumière brothers’ Arrival of a Train allegedly had 19th-century audiences bolting in fear. Today, the pendulum has swung too far to cookie-cutter CG for the stake-free visual noise that rounds off most comic-book movies. But we’ll always have the sweet spot, the wild ride that was the best decade for action: the 1990s.
Obviously, we must acknowledge the groundwork laid by the 1980s. But that decade’s action was often Commando-level predictable and Road House cheesy. It sometimes suffered from being handed over to lacklustre second-unit teams (see Predator’s compound ambush) and could easily be mistaken for The A-Team. Frequently we suffered special effects (the stop-motion ED-209, a skinless Terminator) that veered from terrifying to comical.
The 90s gave Paul Verhoeven the budget he deserved for the subversive Starship Troopers, ‘the most expensive art movie ever made’. The decade was so action-packed it dished up duplicate volcano and asteroid films; one of the latter saw schlubby miners and their epic drilling skills saving Earth backed by an Aerosmith power ballad. We should be grateful. Or is it just me?
