What's with all the action flicks?

[Korpo]

So, this one from this morning after I went back to bed. Lots of somewhat famous actors in it, plus action/horror movie references, I don't get it.

It starts out with a behind the scenes shot. Queen Latifah (I kid you not) is put into some kind of battle armor, prepared for a scene. She's among a group of maybe a hundred similar-styled "amazons" - their gear reminding of US army. It's the dark of night.

The scene changes and the protagonist is Jean-Claude Van Damme. He and his squad are to make to meet someone or find someone, he uses a small device to track movements in the night. It's a mix of the infrared sight of "Predator" and the motion scanner of "Aliens." And somehow he/doesn't get it to work right. Then you hear the horde of the amazon women charge. They seem to be from the same side but kind of have gotten out of control.

Now JCvD is leading a squad that's under attack. It's like the scene in Predator, but set in some valley. I see Jesse Ventura fire his mini-gun at random, telling him it doesn't help. Scene change. I see a sniper fire at the inept platoon commander from "Aliens" (the one who gets them in the mess) and he's falling backwards in slo-mo why bullets come shooting towards him like in "Natural Born Killers" maybe. He gets grazed on the head by the last and falls unconscious.

Now everything is set in a warehouse. A new character arrives. Somehow this place is supposed to be somewhere in nowhere, but he spots some modern hauling equipment. In fact, he comments that the hauling equipment constructed by the guys working here should even be able to outdo the modern hauling equipment and he wants to convince them to try to bring it to its limits.

Scene change - same warehouse, but now the scene is dark and it seems like something is afoot. I run to a VCR and hit stop, but it only pauses. It seems like the screen shows the scene within the warehouse and that one paused as well. The beings from "Predator" are around. I want to end the scene and hit "Stop" till I wake up.


Well, the first odd thing is that I have not seen any of these movies or actors for many years.

All of the scenes contain unreal elements - slo-mo, a scene of setting up the scene before it happens, and controlling the outer environment through the VCR.

Else just a lot of shooting and chasing, and some dark places. I don't get it. When looking what could have been the reason for the dream the only thing I can find is writing that short comment about horror movies yesterday.

Oliver

[CFTraveler]

In a completely unrelated yet related subject, my son has recently become interested in the genre- in the past couple of weeks we saw alien one, two and three, alien vs. predator one and two, and we are going to see the latest predator movie with Adrian Brody. We couldn't find predator one (the one with Arnold S.) so he hasn't seen it.
Coincidence?
Hmmm.

[Korpo]

Well, he's about my age when I saw most of them the first time I guess. But I've watched worse flicks than that - thank goodness Chuck Norris didn't make an appearance!

Oliver

[CFTraveler]

Jackie Chan's the man now.

[Korpo]

Well, Jackie Chan's movies surely have more comical elements and a lot less "self-contained violence." I don't feel like watching a Jackie Chan movie, but "Shanghai Noon" is most certainly preferrable to let's say Norris' "Missing in Action," which I was thinking of. This is exactly the kind of 80s action flick that got ironically immortalised in "Hot Shots 2" where Charlie Sheen is shooting anonymous Iraqi Soldiers till he's out of ammo while at the bottom of the screen there's some kill counter running.

At different times over the years I watched action flicks, gangster movies, played action games, shooters, etc. I've also watched most of that fade back out of my life. Even "Pulp Fiction" is gathering dust on my shelf nowadays.

I wonder if these things leave residue that needs to be cleansed out of the system. If you watch TV you certainly watch a lot of violence, murder, drama and worse. Think "SAW." At the same time I don't think it's that harmful, unless it gets into the hands of kids, real kids I mean. What's harmful to me is that there is always another extreme, like I never watched "Hostel" nor wanted to and found "Silent Hill" too much of an assault on my nervous system with its music-video-like nonsense cuts and scene changes.

So, I guess maybe that was part of why I had this series of dreams - sort of a rerun that purged part of it out of my system.

Oliver