Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster

What makes today's Hollywood films so successful? Is it the sheer scale of special effects that gives films like "Jurassic Park" or "The Matrix" their mass audience appeal? Geoff King looks at the underexplored dynamic relationship between narrative and spectacle in contemporary Hollywood cinema. He uses the myth of the American frontier against a range of Hollywood filmsand drawes examples from the digital-effects-based and virtual-reality spectacles, space fictions, action films, war epics and disaster films that now dominate cinema.