sion. When the children of this generation reached
their movie-going years in the 1980’s, producers had
to find impressive action and violence that this mar-
ket had not seen in childhood. This created a one-
upmanship attitude in Hollywood and led rival stu-
dios to produce bigger, bolder, and bloodier films to
attract audiences. Unfortunately, in many cases the
script writing suffered. This situation was due to ei-
ther the need for more action or lack of money for or
concern with a decent script. Action movies of the
1980’s became notorious for generic plots that were
not bound by the rules of coherency.
A second reason for the popularity of action in
the 1980’s was the rapid technological improvement
in the film industry. Computers were becoming
cheaper and more powerful, and with this develop-
ment, computer-generated imaging (CGI) began to
become a viable application for the film industry. Fu-
turist Syd Meade would later claim that whenTron
was made in 1982, it required one-third of the total
computing power available in the United States. By
the end of the decade, that power had grown expo-
nentially year after year, until directors no longer
were shackled to exploding models and the limits of
the human body; through digital technology, larger
explosions, better backdrops, and inhuman stunts
could be performed. The members of a 1980’s soci-
ety already moving rapidly through technological
barriers demanded more extreme and fantastic feats
of action, and they were willing to subordinate real-
ism to this goal. This trend in the action genre led
budgets to soar and post-production time to esca-
late, resulting in the bigger and better pictures that
audiences craved.
These films also spoke to a generation that
wanted an escape from reality. International rela-
tions with the Soviet Union was always a hot topic,
even in the movies, as many action films’ writers
chose some part of the communist bloc as their
films’ antogonists. However, the decade was a timeThe Eighties in America Action films 13
Action hero Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1987 Stephen King adaptation,Running Man.(AP/Wide World Photos)