GP Draft: Action Sequences! Round 4

Welcome to the penultimate round of our highly entertaining draft of Hollywood’s best action sequences!  Let’s do the thing:

Grimbil) Another childhood favorite of mine, and clearly one of the best action sequences of all time: the first firefight in Aliens. The marines land on the planet and start investigating the empty facility, eventually entering into tunnels covered in alien…stuff. Things get even more tense as they start getting lifeform readings all around them but they can’t see anything. When the aliens uncoil from the walls and start skewering marines, all shit breaks out and we’re given a massive firefight of flying bullets, flamethrowers, and alien acid blood flying everywhere. After a hasty retreat, we get treated to one of the most memorable Doom .wad sound mods, and Bill Paxton’s best line ever: “That’s it, man. Game over, man, game over!”

E) I’m eschewing all the more obvious picks, and going with Saving Private Ryan, the Normandy beach scene. It’s just such controlled chaos, bloody, violent, and manages to be completely intense without being sensationalistic. Every time I watch this movie, it always blows me away.

LD) Die Hard - the rooftop explosion.  In my eyes, Die Hard is the greatest action movie ever, which is interesting, because it doesn’t feature many action setpieces.  There’s action throughout the film, but the plot never stops for A Dramatic Showdown. That’s why it’s so great: it feels like what could happen if you had one tough, clever SOB on your side in that situation.

It’s also why the rooftop explosion works so well. McClane jumping off the roof, tied to a firehose, is the least realistic moment in the film. It’s total action cheese. But, because the movie works so hard to stay grounded, the audience believes in it. Every time he starts to slide out the window, my heart stops, because it feels like he COULD die.

SN) Along those lines…but in the completely opposite direction…I’ll take the chaingun showdown from the final Rambo movie. I’ve never seen so many people cut in half with a chaingun before, and I didn’t know what I was missing until I did. Rambo just stays there, holding his ground, mowing down row after row of soulless Burmese scum. Sadly, this scene did not feature the earlier clip of a man being shot in the head with an arrow and landing on a land mine.

N8)  Robocop…  pretty much the whole damn movie is littered with great action sequences, but especially the finale that pits Robocop Alex Murphy against the ED-209 killing machine.  In 1987, that ED-209 was freaky and its no wonder that Robocop won an Oscar for its specialized sound effects.  More than two decades later, you can still hear that monsterous robot clanking around and cocking it’s gun-arms. Every moving robot on the big screen since sounds a bit like Robocop or ED-209.  And, of course, Robocop blows the crap out of ED-209 using that futuristic elephant gun/sniper rifle, as well as revenging himself on the thugs and their corporate allies.  Come to think of it, the action sequence that precedes those where Robocop gets HIS ass handed to him by the ED-209 is pretty impressive as well.  I remember wincing as he took inhuman punishment.  Nowadays, I’m still waiting for Detroit to actually make a Robocop, but I guess things are bad enough there yet?  In any case, Robocop’s action sequences were stellar and laid the groundwork for the awesome sort-of-man vs. machine showdown you get in T2.  I’d buy that for a dollar!

Grimbil) I remember watching the X-Rated version on laserdisc. It ramps the gore up in certain scenes, that’s about it tho. The scene where they’re giving a demo of the ED-209 and it accidentally kills the guy…in the x-rated version he gets shot for like 30 seconds. Pretty nasty.

JC) In terms of action, it’s not the most “packed”, but it ends on such a great line.  Lethal Weapon 2, Shootout on the Alba Varden. It starts with Riggs going berserk, continues with a crazy knife fight, Riggs stabbing a dude by pulling the knife out of his own body, a cargo container crushing and ends with the famous “Diplomatic Immunity” line, which makes me smile everytime I think about it.