The chariot race of 'Ben Hur' (William Wyler, 1959)
Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) and Messala (Stephen Boyd) channel their hatred and, according to legend, their unresolved tension in front of 7,000 extras who don't care who wins as long as there's a show. And what if there is.
A Roman circus: the largest set built to date.
The director, William Wyler, handed over the reins to his two-second unit directors so that, over a year, they would prepare and film the legendary chariot race. The goal was to shoot the greatest scene in history. A flight with no escape that appeals to the most antediluvian rivalry: good against evil. White horses against black horses. The master against the slave.
The lack of scruples of Messala tuning his wheels to destroy those of his opponents and whipping them against the dignity of Ben-Hur, whose only talent is to endure. And yet, the most overwhelming thing about the scene and what will make it transcend forever and ever is the attitude of the two rivals, as if nothing on Earth mattered more than that race. In Ancient Rome, chariot racing was the greatest event in the known world. In 1959, 2,000 years later, they were at it again: this is the first modern action scene, and it still rocks like it was shot yesterday.
The scene of the 88 maniacs from 'Kill Bill' (Quentin Tarantino, 2003)
The garden of a restaurant in Okinawa (Japan)
Shot in black and white to avoid the classification of "Not suitable for persons under 18 years of age", this combat is the result of a director who is fulfilling his dream and of one of the actresses who best uses her elastic physique for each character she plays. all of it is a weapon. The bride cuts off limbs, swords, and heads. She jumps, flies, and crawls. The public howls because she is certain that she is going to win: the emotion does not arise from what is going to happen but from how it is going to happen. There is bloodshot, there are hundreds of shots from humanly impossible angles, and, above all, Tarantino's outburst is clear when he claims the magnificence not of violence, but of cinematographic violence.
The recent revelation of the harassment and physical abuse that Thurman suffered during filming has rewritten the meaning of her final sentence, which the actress could dedicate today to her aggressors: “Those of you who are still alive, you can go. But leave your limbs. Now they belong to me." Revenge can sometimes be retroactive. And it is always satisfying.
The entire movie of 'Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015)
Fertile women, old women, cripples, slaves, and morons: when you make the people believe that they are worthless, they will feel that they have nothing to lose when they rise up.
The desert
Max stays in the passenger seat in a forward flight (and back) that dignified action cinema through an overwhelming visual narrative (at 45 degrees there is no room for jokes) that returned to the genre the blood, dirt, junk, and sweat: cars, for the first time in the digital age, weighed again, rusted again and destroyed again. And when some loser shows up spitting fire from his guitar, there's no choice but to applaud freak George Miller and Imperator Furiosa, a woman who literally blazed a feminist trail where there were no roads.
