7. The Human Body Can Do More, And Take More
In a movie, you can dive through the air in slow motion while dual-wielding Glocks, and not worry about smashing your elbows like dropped porcelain when you land. You can exchange punches and drop-kicks with your nemesis for ten straight minutes, bleed enough to supply a vampire keg-party and still have the strength to snarl a one-liner. In a movie, no-one ever complains about a stubbed toe (well, Viggo Mortensen did when he mangled one of his by kicking a helmet in The Two Towers, but hes the exception that proves the rule), or spends fifteen minutes gently teasing out a splinter. But the really cool thing about the endurance abilities of movie characters is that recovery times tend to be absurdly generous. You rarely see people messily wounded or hospitalised for months; youre either instantly dead or youre scrambling back to your feet with a manly wince after a super-villain or a Terminator has thrown you across the room. You can power through brawls that would leave you a twitching bundle of internal injuries and only collapse after the villain is a smear on the landscape.
8. Violence Is Beautiful
On the subject of violence, movies, particularly action and superhero movies, are truly miraculous in that they make one of the most grotesque aspects of the real world into something exhilarating and aesthetically pleasing. Squalid, boring modern warfare cant hold a candle to the hyperkinetic battling in a movie like The Avengers, where the camera never lingers on the grieving families of the alien infantry or the field hospitals where Lokis followers writhe in agony from the severe burns inflicted by Iron Mans repulsor rays.