CINEMA: ONE DUMB SUMMER

Hollywood rules. Moviegoers in almost every foreign country prefer American films to their own. They love our action pictures, with their size and tempo and assurance, and all those pretty people realizing outrageous dreams. Our directors know how to fulfill Alfred Hitchcock's aim: to make the Japanese audience scream at the same time as the American audience. Perhaps they know it too well. A manic roteness now envelops action films; the need to thrill has become a drab addiction. Isn't there more to moviemaking than having your finger on the pulse of the world public? Can't the megalo-melodrama be infused with passion and ingenuity? The answer so far, and with just one exception, is no--not this season. For this is the Summer of Dumb.

Maybe this is not new. Some years back, a film critic observed that the problem with summer pictures wasn't that they were bad movies; it was that they were the same bad movie. But more than ever this summer, with the moguls at the sausage factories sending out a new slice of action salami each week--The Lost World: Jurassic Park, followed by Con Air, Speed 2: Cruise Control, Batman & Robin, Face/Off and Men in Black--the big films look like instant remakes, retreads or reductios ad absurdum of last Friday's film, which wasn't all that hot either. Some of the movies have incidental felicities, and, to abort all suspense right now, Face/Off is damn fine. But in sum, these films offer evidence that the action-adventure has reached a point of exhaustion. Seen as one 12-hour epic, this multiplex six-pack moves less on cruise control than on automatic pilot. This is zombie entertainment: cinema with motor skills but a dead brain.

At the end of a genre cycle, directors jettison character and story for bustle and special effects--noise and toys. Here are four reasons movies aren't better.

SMALL MINDS THINK ALIKE. It's as if Hollywood had just one huge brainstorming session for all its summer movies. Someone says, "I took a boat ride last week. Let's have a climactic boat chase." Speed 2 ends with one, and so, for no maritime reason, does Face/Off.

Somebody else says, "How about if we have a kid seeing something really scary out a second-story window, but his parents don't believe him, and then the scary thing does its dirty work?" Swell: a dinosaur in The Lost World, a runaway cruise ship in Speed 2.

A third guy looks up from his PC and says, "Computers!" So half of the pictures either have someone laboriously logging on or, as in Speed 2, hand the villain a Mighty Morphin PowerBook as his tool of terror.

A fourth guy says, "All movies are comic books these days. Let's do more movies based on comic books!" Not just Batman & Robin and Men in Black but also two August releases, Spawn and Steel, are comic book-inspired. This junk-culture trend must please the kids in the Development departments; no more novels to read, with all those annoying words.