Improbable movie moments: outrunning stuff

Run! Run! RUN! Go! Go! GO! Don't look back! NOW!

Have finer words been spoken in the history of the motion picture? If so, I have not heard them. Yes, today, let us salute the long, improbable, unappreciated history of outrunning stuff in film. Which, it must be noted, is not the same as running away or merely jogging. A true outrunning-stuff moment requires remaining a step ahead — a step, inches from failure, the hot breath of fate at your neck.

Film history may be marked with technical innovation and aesthetic breakthroughs so seamlessly assimilated its value is taken for granted — the birth of sound, the hand-held camera shot, the Technicolor process. But why spend time swooning over middling innovations like those when Roland Emmerich has a new disaster movie coming out? "2012" opens Nov. 13, and will feature, as most of his films have, virtuosic scenes of characters outrunning all sorts of stupid stuff. Indeed, Emmerich, the German-born auteur who made "The Day After Tomorrow" and "Independence Day" and that remake of "Godzilla," and a bunch of other entertaining junk tailor-made for 3 a.m. on a Tuesday, has raised the device to an art.

Let us not mince words: He is the Orson Welles of outrunning stuff —the standard bearer. He did not originate the cliche, though. Movie characters have been outrunning stuff since the earliest Tarzan adventures, since the Keystone Kops first gave chase, since (sorta) silent-film comedian Harold Lloyd first stepped unwittingly out of the way of certain death. As connected as the idea is to the impossible, however, outrunning stuff didn't really take fruit until the 1950s, when special effects gained in prominence. There are a pair of two classic precedents from this period: a town running from "The Blob" (1958) and Cary Grant running from a crop duster in "North by Northwest" (1959, pictured below). Beginning with Sean Connery, James Bond has outrun the bullets aimed at his feet for decades. And of course, Indiana Jones famously outran an enormous boulder in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981).

Still, those are tangible things. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis perfected the art of outrunning the fireball. "Star Wars" (1977) and "Alien" (1979) popularized the idea of outrunning shock waves. So, yes, characters have even outrun physics for decades. But Emmerich, I believe, made it safe for Hollywood to consider the outrunning of truly insane things — a breeze (" The Happening," 2008), a sunrise ("The Mummy Returns," 2001) and a black hole ( "Star Trek," 2009). He also imbued his sequences with a sweaty, breathless, albeit impossible, sense of scramble such moments often lacked. And so, what follows is a brief history of outrunning stuff in Roland Emmerich movies — arranged not in cinematic but geological order, sorta.


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