Sometimes you raise the bar, sometimes the bar raises you

I hadn’t written anything about this rule until I came up with this title on the bike ride over. From a good listen to the commentary of impossibly lovable Jurassic Park 3, there is an obsession in the filmaking community with ‘raising the bar’. To wit, that once we’ve done this effect, we have to do ten of them even better. The action (read: blurry frenetics) scenes of the final Avengers film are a case in point: painterly, but ultimately dull. To make more and faster is easy – you just count it. To make better is subtle and complex, therefore harder. So why try?