But this notion that bigger is better is plain wrong. You can’t give the audience the same thing they’ve always had. The thing is, directors have good intentions. Of the five Transformers movies, can you name two memorable set-pieces? I can’t. It’s a bunch of outlandish craziness thrown at you from every angle. Michael Bay is a great action director, but his set-piece writing sucks. The person who drove the set-piece off a cliff, though, was Michael Bay. But the war scenes kept getting bigger and more cumbersome with each passing film, until at a certain point you had no idea what was happening onscreen. I blame the Lord of the Rings trilogy for this. In the pursuit to one-up the past, writers and directors erroneously believed that bigger was better. You can count a half-dozen in Raiders of the Lost Ark alone. We used to have tons of great set pieces in movies. A group of survivors in a zombie apocalypse walking into a creepy “vacant” supermarket is a set piece, for example. Over time, the term “set piece” has evolved to include any featured extended scene in a movie. The term “set piece” refers to the olden days when the scene was such a major part of the movie, it needed its own special set. For those of you who don’t know what set pieces are, they’re the big featured action scenes in a script, your Indiana Jones runs through a cave, your airport battle in Captain America: Civil War, that scene in every Mission Impossible movie where Tom Cruise races a motorcycle through a city at 200 miles per hour. We are reaching an epidemic in bad set-piece writing.
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