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The first shot fired in Die Hard is not until 17:52 (!!), at least in the version in front of me
There's a brief lobby shootout and some hostage-taking. A lot of tense moments, some isolated violence. Not until 37:05 does John McClane actually fight someone
Of course, a huge part of this is that Die Hard doesn't always draw a clear line between action sequences and "other". It doesn't stop and start in that way. It ebbs and flows. Tension rises as a potential shootout looms, then falls as McClane barely scrapes away undetected
This means that when the back half hour of the movie is almost relentless action, it actually feels like the movie, you know, rose to a climax. It went somewhere, organically
Here's a scene Die Hard gets right which everybody gets wrong. McClane is in the vent. The terrorist (Karl?) is in the room below and suspects that the vent above him is where McClane is hidden. Karl prods each section of vent from below with the tip of his machine gun...pic.twitter.com/F7LXOZEy0y
Karl is getting closer and closer to finding McClane. When he finds him, McClane is toast. Will he find him? Or will pure happenstance cause Karl to get distracted and give up, just short? So tense! Except, no! That's NOT tense, nor is it what's happening in the scene
The reason this ~classic bit~ is not tense is that there's nothing which can distract the hunter except pure, dumb luck. In other words, something *introduced by the script writer*. The hunter is not easily distracted; the quarry has no options. No character agency. Who cares?
The reason Die Hard's implementation of this ~classic bit~ works is that McClane is not without options. He pulls a gun and points it right back at Karl. Now, it's a terrible angle, a stupid place to start a gunfight from
So the point of tension is: who's going to shoot first? How long will McClane wait? *Is* he actually toast if Karl finds him first? Will he have to start a firefight while stuck in the ceiling? And so when Karl is distracted... it still feels like it could have gone either way
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