The Classic Adventure Film

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Since school let out, not too long ago, I've been binging on one of my favorite pastimes: Movies. More specifically, adventure films of the old school. You know, Kim, Captain Blood, King Solomon's Mines, Zulu, Indiana Jones... the kind of adventure where the principal male lead should have been played by Errol Flynn, and usually was.

The thing I've noticed... there's must be hundreds of the buggers, right up until the late 70s or early 80s. There's a few that came out after, like, of course, Indiana Jones and the 1994 Jungle Book live action adaptation, and Pirates of the Caribbean, but overall, the genre seems to be tapering off.

I mean, there's a lot of sci-fi adventure films, like Star Trek, but at least for me, there's a far greater appeal to some dude with a rifle heading into the bush to hunt elephants or lost treasure, contending with the land itself than there is watching a bunch of guy sitting in a tin can, far above the world.

I got to thinking what movies I've watched in the last year or two could be called "Classic Adventure" (I'm even including DVDs here, not just new movies)... Blood Diamond and maybe Skyfall are the only ones that come to mind. And that brings me to my second problem. They're all so moody! Take Skyfall (and really all the Craig Bond movie). Where you could look to the older Bond movies to provide good action scenes and light-hearted, quippy fun, these ones are much darker. Star Trek even seems to be leaning more toward the edgy and violent than the hopeful romanticism of the past. Blood Diamond has an excuse, you know, brutal genocide and all... What's yours, Star Trek?

Has the taste for romantic, good-humored swashing and buckling completely vanished? Or is it like Adventure PC games, and drifted into a small, niche, background fandom? Why is this? What are your thoughts, and what are some of your favorite adventure films?

You can tell from my avatar that I have a thing for Robin Hood and adventure. In this modern age our heroes don't ride horses and shoot arrows from a quiver - they fly cars through the air at 120 MPH, crash through buildings and blow up spaceships with fancy explosives. I don't think we'll ever see the end of "classic" adventure though. Someone is always going to remake Robin Hood. Five or ten years from now there'll be a Nostradamus story or another Middle Earth adventure or the adventure of some Grimm fairy tale character taken to Hollywood extremes. I mean, they just made two Hansel & Gretel stories. It's just a matter of time before a Rumplestiltskin, Rapunzel or Rose Red story comes along.

They don't make this kind of stuff anymore. Everything's gotta be "dark and gritty," because studios are trying to please the hardcore fans who take their stories about about a guy dressed as a bat fighting a clown far too seriously. I would recommend the two big franchises with Robert Downey Jr, Iron Man and Sherlock Holmes. They have their grim elements, but you don't feel like the director is pointing a gun at you the whole time, ready to pull the trigger if you smile or have any fun.

I'm not a big superhero guy anymore (Although I'd kill for a Captain Britain movie! ) but I adored both of the Sherlock Holmes movies. I'd consider them classic adventure style, although more in the vein of the old James Bond films than say, Hatari! (I'm the world's biggest sucker for safari films).

That's one reason I never could figure out why everyone liked Batman so much. It's just... dour! If I was gonna watch a superhero movie, I'd rather see Green Arrow or someone with an actual personality.

Honestly, I feel like this attachment to dark and gritty is because a bunch of man-children somehow feel like it's more grownup.

Welcome to the world of fanboys: a bunch of grown men refusing to admit that something they enjoy might be silly. The irony, of course, is that taking a character as fundamentally ridiculous as Batman and putting him in a movie with a tone that's more serious than Se7en or Schindler's List just makes him seem even more silly than he already is.

I actually used to be a huge Batman fan, so much so that I got the Knightfall logo tattooed on my arm when I was 20. That was before Christopher Nolan came along and everyone decided that Batman movies are supposed to be as dour and grim and joyless as possible. My enthusiasm faded and hasn't recovered much over the years, but I would still recommend some of the pre-Nolan movies and TV shows. The two Tim Burton films, the Bruce Timm animated series, and the animated film Mask of the Phantasm are dark and serious but not so much that they feel like they're overcompensating for fanboy insecurity. They're fun, in other words.

The two Sherlock Holmes films with Downey made me think more of Lethal Weapon than Bond, the way they put the focus on two heroes who bicker like a married couple, letting two actors who are very different and yet have lots of chemistry just bounce dialogue off one another. It's infectious, and contributes more to the success of the film than any of the action scenes. Not that the action scenes aren't good; Guy Ritchie is surprisingly skilled at it.