Towards the end of Tetsuya Nakashima's stunning revenge psychodrama Confessions, there's a bomb blast filmed in a way I can't recall having seen before. No mean feat, because explosions are now such an integral part of the film-maker's train set that it's hard to think of a modern action movie that doesn't feature at least one orgasmic detonation, followed by cool guys strolling away with nary a singed eyebrow, not even (as the song goes) bothering to look back.
It wasn't always thus. Explosions in movies used to be memorable. Their natural bailiwick was the war film, but they also cropped up in gangster movies ("Made it Ma! Top of the world!" from White Heat) and thrillers. Hitchcock, who famously blew up a small boy on a bus in Sabotage (and later told Truffaut he regretted it because it had made the public "resentful") used the "bomb under the table" to illustrate the difference between surprise and suspense.
Surprise is a bomb going off without the audience having prior knowledge of it; suspense means that they know it's there. Powell and Pressburger's The Small Back Room, in which David Farrar plays a wartime bomb-disposal expert, dispenses with on-screen explosions altogether, but that doesn't stop a 20-minute sequence on Chesil Beach from being a small masterclass in knuckle-gnawing suspense.
Two of the films that marked my childhood dangled the threat of explosive detonation for an agonisingly long time before delivering it. The entire build-up of Kiss Me Deadly hinges on the significance of the words "Manhattan Project, Los Alamos, Trinity", which unsettles the audience more than it seems to worry ignorant antihero Mike Hammer, who continues to bulldoze his way through the mystery until that extraordinary apocalyptic ending. And the trucks laden with nitroglycerine in The Wages of Fear are just a big bang waiting to happen – though when something does go off, Henri-Georges Clouzot films it in a simple but off-kilter way (later copied in Vertical Limit), which is more shocking than any amount of fancy slo-mo or bullet time.
The landmark movie explosions can be counted on your fingers – Zabriskie Point, Scanners, The Fury – whereas you could barely squeeze their imitators into a stadium. But somewhere around Die Hard, movie-explosion fatigue started to set in. In Armageddon, Michael Bay blows up space stations, asteroids the size of Texas, Paris, Bruce Willis – basically, everything he can think of. It used to take cojones to destroy the world, like Stanley Kubrick in Dr Strangelove, or Steve De Jarnatt in Miracle Mile (which begins as a perky romcom but builds, astonishingly, to all-out MAD), but nowadays Roland Emmerich trashes the planet practically every time he makes a film. (We will, however, give a free pass to Takashi Miike, who was clearly taking the miike when he came over all Emmerich in the cop-versus-Yakuza showdown at the end of Dead or Alive.)
But one can't help feeling directors such as Emmerich and Bay are missing the point, treating us to climax after climax when many of us would prefer some decent foreplay, at least. "I hear you control your explosions," Sharon Stone purrs to Sylvester Stallone in the absurd but irresistible The Specialist, and you only wish more directors would control theirs. For example, there's only one blast in La Scorta, a film that has you on the edge of your seat waiting for the mafia to plant a bomb to kill off the bodyguards or the judge they're assigned to protect. But director Ricky Tognazzi makes it count.
As does Kathryn Bigelow in The Hurt Locker, where the booby-trapped beginning establishes the stakes, shows that everyone is expendable and leaves you on tenterhooks for the rest of the film, even when nothing much is going on. But most of today's action-movie directors would rather blow something up every two seconds. The more they go off, the less ammo they have left. It's not even surprising any more, let alone suspenseful.