Tuesday

How and when you kill innocent people in action movies is critical to maintaining the sympathy of your audience. You need to show your bad guys really are bad. You want your audience to be afraid, but you don't want them terrified. It's a very difficult aspect to judge correctly. You need to compensate for the deaths - normally by having a character mourn them, or get revenge. In some films millions of people are killed, but we as the audience don't mind. In others, however, one person dies and we feel upset. In Star Wars, for instance, a whole planet is destroyed, but we don't particularly feel the loss. It works as a plot point, but doesn't upset us because we're never shown the people who live on the planet. Similar mass killings happen in The Day After Tomorrow, War of the Worlds and Independence Day. You can see the differing grades of loss. The Day After Tomorrow was criticised for the lack of compensation - you can't get back at nature - but importantly the characters we care about survive. In Die Hard 2 a whole plane load of innocent passengers is killed. We're given too much information about them, we're allowed to see them as individual and human, and I think their loss is too much for an audience. Important in this respect is the factor of 'if I was there I would've survived'. In the Die Hard 2 example there is no escape. You want to scare your audience, but not petrify them. In war films we see many deaths, but they're compensated for by them being acclaimed heroes, or by the work they did eventually resulting in a victory. So, before you kill an innocent person, remember to ask yourself the question: am I alienating my audience?