Dana Bell

Going to the movies is generally a good escape, although I have grown more and more indifferent to the movies and video entertainment in general. I suppose much of it is my fault. Having been a writer and student of writing, I've learned most of the basic plotlines of novels and their quicker movie scripts. There's very little new. Different people, different locations, same stories. The exception might be the mystery with numerous twists, although even then, the "who done it" is generally and almost obviously, the least suspected.

I just returned from the big screen where I saw The Marine. Maybe I should say, I saw the rest of The Marine. The trailer had already given us the storyline and compacted all the action scenes in the 2 minutes promo.

Machoism was the key principle, and the patterns in the movie were repeated at least three times. You find the good guy in a car, building or something; the bad guy blows it up, and in the midst of the explosion the good guy jumps out and into the water. One of the characters was cast as an a pyromaniac, but the real pyromaniac was the script writer. That was just about all there was to the movie.

The action scenes on it weren't even that impressive. As some of you may have noticed, it's the same explosion several times in a row, each one at a different zoom level, and with the main character dubbed into it. The things he managed to escape were also unrealistic.

I do like action movies, but generally, these movies are an insult to our intelligence. Not only is it insulting to me, but given the simplistic nature of the pursuit and final conclusion, this one was an insult to real Marines. Unfortunately, there are many movie-goers that aren't insulted.

Why did I see it? It's better than the endless barrage of horror flicks that take insult to the max. But I'll have some other things to say about them.