Genre Research- Action/Adventure, Disaster, Film Noir

The next two genres I am researching are:

• Action/Adventure

• Disaster

Action and Adventure is one of the most popular genres and there are six different types of action/adventure films, Historical, Thriller/Suspense, Quest, Swashbuckler, Disaster and Fantasy. A code of action/adventure is Levi Strauss' Binary Opposites; the idea that conflict drives the narrative, this can be any opposites, the stereotypical good vs bad, or any others like, man vs woman, rich vs poor, military vs rebels etc. This is shown quite clearly in the scene from The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003, dir. Peter Jackson), where it is clearly the Orcs vs everyone else. You can also distinguish the Orcs and the antagonists who are all a cream, dirty white, colour, whilst the protagonists are all in white or silver, clearly representing them as clean and good.





(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQee3ag4niE)

The locations of action adventure films are usually quite dangerous place, like other planets, jungles, or a fantasy seemingly dangerous world. One exception to this rule that is used reasonably a lot, is that locations can also be set in cities, or ordinary setting, this makes the narrative seem more believable and 'close to home' and this also makes the film more exciting more the audience.

Action/adventure typically follow the character types, theorized by Vladimir Propp, these different character types, can be found in most films, not just action/adventure. The character types are as below. You can also easily show these though an example of a film. Take Pirates of The Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (2003, dir. Gore Verbinski), each corresponding character is next to the character stereotype.

• Hero- Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp)
• Villain- Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush)
• Princess- Elizabeth Swann (Kiera Knightly)
• False Hero- Norrington (Jack Davenport)
• The Donor- Joshamee Gibbs (Kevin McNally)
• The Princess' Father- Govenor Weatherby Swann (Jonathan Pryce)
• The Helper- Will Turner (Orlando Bloom)

The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is slightly unstereotypical regarding character stereotypes, as the main character easily seem to 'swap sides'. Captain Jack Sparrow's position regarding being protagonist or antagonist changes frequently throughout the films. Barbossa also swaps sides from film to film, antagonist in the first film, protagonist in the third, and antagonist yet converts again to protagonist in the fourth. The characters in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise change sides so often because they're all lots of different groups, and some enemies join together against a common enemy depending on the current narrative. Also unstereotypical about The Pirates of the Carribbean franchise, is Jack Sparrow. Typically, the main character are, strong, straight, physically able characters, but Jack Sparrow, is rather camp and gets around doing things by using other people and trickery. As you can tell, there are a lot of adaptations on the stereotypes of Action and Adventure films, this is because  Action/Adventure is a very common genre, and directors and filmmakers often are trying new ways to represent and portray the similar narratives.

In action/adventure films the film is veer much driven by the narrative, with the appropriate mise-en-scene maintaining this. There is often a love interest sub-story within the plot along with this, and as Thriller can be considered as sub-genre of Action/Adventure, the way the love interest in thrillers and action/adventure are very similar. Either genre, include both participants of the love interest, equally or relatively equally. The best example of this, is also, Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pear, (2003, dir. Gore Verbinski), below is the trailer.




(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z1XpfbuZOA)

You can see from the trailer, that Elizabeth Swann (Kiera Knightly) features a lot through out the film, as has about equal screen time, and importance to the narrative, as her love interest counter part, Will Turner (Orlando Bloom).

Disaster films are a subgenre of Action/Adventure, but are often crossed with thrillers, as well as the drama genre. Disasters are typically a action/adventure narratives, such as a goal, binary opposites, all mentioned above, but are set in typical thriller, and possibly even horror genre locations. If they are also crossed with Drama, that is normally from isoloation, or struggle of survival. Disaster films predict or show the ending, or destruction of a community, normally the earth or human population, although can focus on smaller communities; Titanic (1997, dir. James Cameron). There are endless ways that filmmakers show how this occurs, but the main three catergories of Disaster film disasters are man made, alien, and natural disasters. Below, are the most popular ways of disaster causes within the three catergories, in film and a few known examples:

Alien contact- I am Ledgend (2007, dir. Francis Lawrence); War of the Worlds (2005, dir. Steven Speilberg)

Epidemic- Contagian (2011, dir. Steven Soderberg); 28 Days Later (2002, dir. Danny Boyle)

Transportation crash- Source Code (2011, dir. Duncan Jones); Titanic (1997, dir. James Cameron)

Geological- Deep Impact (1998, dir. Mimi Leder); 2012 (2009, Roland Emmerich)



The classification of disaster causes in film, and the examples are from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disaster_films
Although Wikipedia is considered unreliable, here, it was only used as www.imdb.com (a more reliable film database) did not provide a listing of Disaster films. All examples I used from Wikipediainfomation found on Wikipedia.