MOVIES OF THE ‘80s : ADVENTURE: RACING NOWHERE

Facilities and techniques were never better for today’s adventure film makers: How can you improve the car chases in “Road Warrior” or “Raiders of the Lost Ark” or the plane battles in “Top Gun” (otherwise, a bad joke), or find a better runaway train than Konchalovsky’s?

Several decades of continued refinement have brought the stunt men and action choreographers and cameramen to unparalleled peaks.

But there are elements just as crucial to great epics that are usually missing today: the psychological and historical dimension brought by directors like Ford, Hawks, Kurosawa or Eisenstein. And those are the weaknesses in most of the adventure movies today--including some listed below.

Sheer action has taken over, become the raison d’etre, an end in itself. Sometimes, as in the Indiana Jones sagas or “Romancing the Stone”--or, worse, the parodies of those movies--it’s such a spoof of a spoof that the film winds up with the thickness of a Xerox sheet.

Best Adventure Films: The Emerald Forest (Boorman), The Right Stuff (Kaufman), Utu (Murphy), The Road Warrior (Miller), Salvador (Stone), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Spielberg), Runaway Train (Konchalovsky), The Killing Fields (Joffe), The Year of Living Dangerously (Weir).