Okay, what happened to the budget during the airport scene where the camera pans away from where the explosion is going to happen with Beatty, then you "hear" the explosion and the camera shakes. Wasn't this hollywood??? This cheapened the whole thing for me. I laughed out loud at how ridiculous it was.
shareNot every Hollywood production has a massive budget that would extend to blowing up a plane just for a small scene like that. Even if they used the special effects of the day, it'd probably look just as phony anyway.
shareThere´s no particular reason the explosion should have been shown onscreen... and it also makes sense, sort of, that the camera stays with Frady who´s in almost every scene. Besides, when the boat blows up, with him on it, we do get our explosion fix, anyway.
"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan
He's right: We had to stay with Frady/Beatty because we know what he knows. We see what he sees. That's the point of the end of the film - we only know what he knew. It was the aesthetic of the film. It's called the art of film, and it's FREAKING AWESOME! I loved this movie.
"All I want in life is a thirty share and a twenty rating."
I agree. I thought the fact that you didn't see the explosion was genius, the fact that it was so downplayed.
shareYeah; it bothered me at first.
But after a while, I figured it was unnecessary to show the plane blowing up. They left a lot of things to our minds.
As to budget, imagine what it cost just to paint that plane for a few scenes!
I was most impressed by the stunt at the beginning. If you look at the distant scene of the Space Needle, you can see how they did the stunt. The sloping roof has a parapet under it that extends far beyond the roof. Strange design for when it rains, but tailor-made for this stunt!
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_HViZrv9RMTA/TKUQmh3KAMI/AAAAAAAAANI/fw6w-NiNa_8/s1600/Space+Needle+Flag+Helicopter+Close+Up.jpg
All they had to do was remove some of those suicide/bottle throwing prevention screens.
I loved the scene at the dam, too. The powerful horn would make a great ring-tone. And the power of that water.
If they had to do more than one take, they'd have to wait for all the water to dry and the dam to refill a bit.
Sad when the editor died... Paula Prentiss' character, too.
Loved the movie, including the ending.
See, I wasn't bothered by not seeing the plane at all; that is classic Pakula and Hitchcock: Don't show everything--allow the audience to fill in the blanks. Pakula's mise-en-scene makes special use of long shots, in which the audience has to "seek out" the point of interest, masterfully shown in the dam sequence in which Beatty is just a tiny speck of color and action in the swirling and cascading waters at the right forefront. This is echoed again in the catwalks when Frady is crawling underneath the "assassins."
So I don't think it was a budgetary issue. Not showing the plane blow up was an artistic choice since another explosion would not have dramatically added anything to the scene (we already saw the boat explode). Now if Michael Bay had made the film, we'd be picking shrapnal out of our teeth after every bullet was discharged. Sometimes restraint is better.
It wasn't the plane that blew up, it was the piece of luggage that contained the ticking bomb. Remember, we see a cart full of luggage being driven away, then hear the explosion.
I agree, much more effective not seeing the actual explosion, because the boat exploding later had more impact. This way, we, the audience, weren't already de-sensitised to an explosion.
Thank you for bringing the voice of reason, Alwood!
It made perfect sense creatively for that explosion to be offscreen and distant, since Frady is safely away -- having, for a time, resourcefully escaped death once again.
Alwood wrote:
I agree, much more effective not seeing the actual explosion, because the boat exploding later had more impact. This way, we, the audience, weren't already de-sensitised to an explosion.
"[...]we see a cart full of luggage being driven away, then hear the explosion."
We don't see any carts after plane lands (just rewatched that scene).
I definitely do agree that it was for artistic reasons, not budgetary:
I think no one mentioned here yet that bomb is not supposed to annihilate half of a plane, but to damage it enough to bring it down - which might theoretically be achieved even without breaching the integrity of the hull. Showing it in a realistic way would look a bit weird (i.e. explosion that only makes a small hole in the hull).
Not to mention that the amount of perils and close calls heaped upon our hero was already borderline ridiculous - downplaying it goes towards maintaining suspension of disbelief.
Hollywood today is the equivalent of blowing everything up and plots where no one has to really pay attention. That's not how Hollywood was in the 70s. It wasn't ridiculous at all. The overabundance of explosions is what makes films cheap - not the lack of them.
The people you idolize wouldn't like you.
Go watch your michael bay movies. Films such as The Parallax View are a bit much for you.
shareYes, it would have been SOOO incredibly expensive to build a small plane model and blow it up. Anyways, the explosion happening out of sight's actually more effective here.
"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan
its funny, the entire airliner scene is so memorable, first thing I think of when I think of the movie, brilliantly staged
share