10 Great Movies That Accidentally Made Cinema Worse
8. The Bourne Supremacy Taught A Generation Of Action Directors About Shaky Cam
The Bourne Supremacy is a remarkable sequel to The Bourne Identity, and one elevated significantly by Paul Greengrass' intense and kinetic direction.
Throughout the film, Greengrass extensively utilised intentionally shaky camera work during action sequences in order to heighten the chaotic realism of what we're seeing, giving it a faux-documentary vibe which, for a time, felt refreshingly unique.
But in the years that followed countless inferior filmmakers used "shaky cam" cinematography yet without Greengrass' shrewd understanding of visual language.
While Greengrass was smart to keep the subject in the center of the frame during much of his action that employed shaky cam, for other directors it was simply used as a crutch to compensate for poor fight choreography. This is certainly the case in the Taken sequels and the first Hunger Games.
The Bourne Supremacy's precise editing ensured we always knew the spatial geography of a given moment, no matter how much camera shake there was, yet for many action directors the style just emboldened them to shoot tons of mediocre, scarcely comprehensible coverage and splice it all together with quick cuts in the editing room.
Greengrass is one of the very few directors to handle shaky cam well, but the trend pissed off audiences enough that it's more-or-less died a death in recent years.