Revenge of The Dyna-Movies

By RICHARD CORLISS

From the reviews, you may think that Gremlins 2: The New Batch is about a cute creature who battles his evil brethren to save Manhattan. You may read that RoboCop 2 is about a police officer, half man, half machine, who battles his evil robot twin to save Detroit. You may have heard that Total Recall is about Arnold Schwarzenegger trying to reclaim his memory and save Mars.

Wrong. For the makers of many summer films, the storytelling art is passe. These talented fellows want to dream up worlds that can exist only in the cinema. Call their pictures dyna-movies, for they are dynamic rather than dramatic. They trade in sensation, in the jolts a moviegoer gets at seeing a villain's body blow up real good. Their impact is the sum of their special effects. And their tone is high facetiousness; the whole construct is an elaborate joke.

For decades, critics lamented that cinema, unlike painting and music, was yoked to narrative. Movies told stories about real people, and the audience was meant to care about them. Would Rick leave Casablanca with Ilsa? Would Scarlett get Rhett? Film theorists didn't care. They wanted movies to slip the shackles of realism and burst into modernism. For cinema to enter the intellectual mainstream, there had to be movies whose subject was movies.

Now there are such films. But they are not made by starving artists in a garage in Munich and called, say, Kinesis Synthesis 3. They are made by hundreds of well-paid technicians in Hollywood and called Gremlins 2. The film is so much about itself that it summons up a movie critic (Entertainment Tonight's Leonard Maltin) to offer a pan of Gremlins One. Halfway through, the film breaks down, the screen goes blank, and then gremlins are seen taking over the movie house. In the lobby a mother shouts at the theater manager, "This is even worse than the last one!"

Most films offer the viewer one thing at a time to look at, one emotion to feel. A dyna-movie demands more; the eye must search every corner of the film frame for glancing gags. Look closely in the villain's lair in RoboCop 2 and find effigies of his patron saints: Jesus, Mother Teresa, Elvis, Oliver North. Listen hard to Gremlins 2 and catch witty details about zillionaire Daniel Clamp's cable empire. It includes 24-hour channels devoted to archery and laundry, and a movie channel featuring "Casablanca, but with color -- and a happier ending." Gremlins 2 should carry the warning FOR ATTENTIVE VIEWERS ONLY.

In their speed, technical wizardry, surface brilliance and cheerful cynicism, dyna-movies are the ideal art form for the MTV generation. Zapped for a decade by the lightning impulses of rock videos, inured to slaughter by campy slasher films, kids have become scarily sophisticated; they are connoisseurs of carnage. They know that in a blood ballet like Total Recall everybody gets killed but nobody gets hurt -- because the characters aren't human beings but ciphers, cyborgs, stunt people and stunted characters, no more real than the creatures vaporized in Nintendo games.

Even a pre-MTV adult can find the game exhilarating -- for about an hour. Then it runs out of gas or fizzles out, as Gremlins 2 pretends to and ultimately does. At the climax, when other movies are accelerating, a dyna- movie must slow down in a vain search for emotional heft. By the end, viewers may be exhausted from information overload. Instead of leaving the theater with a rosy glow or warm tears, dyna-moviegoers feel like a James Bond vodka martini. They have been shaken but not stirred.