Ryan Britt is a writer at Inverse and other publications and the author of the essay collection "Luke Skywalker Can't Read and Other Geeky Truths."

This post includes spoiler alerts for "Captain America: Civil War" and "Star Wars: The Force Awakens."

I’m no prude when it comes to violence in action and science fiction or fantasy films. I think Batman probably needs to punch people from time to time and Han Solo should certainly not be prevented from wielding his blaster. But it irritates me when violent sequences are inserted into movies as lazy shortcuts to make up for a bad storyline, or to make a pop-narrative seem “gritty” or “dark.”

For example, nothing about my experience of watching the recently released "Captain America: Civil War" was enhanced by the scenes of people being water-boarded or graphically strangled to death. It seemed like the kind of violence that just makes a movie with broad appeal less appealing. The manner in which Robert Downey Jr.'s character, Tony Stark/Iron Man, witnesses his parents murdered is far more unnecessarily graphic than say, the way Han Solo is killed by his son in last year's "Star Wars: The Force Awakens." I’m all for moral ambiguity in both films, but there’s something slightly more artful about the lack of gratuitous violence in "The Force Awakens" than the horrific scenes of killing in "Civil War."

I'd much rather the filmmakers and screenwriters work to tell the story creatively, instead of hitting the audience in the face with brutal imagery that forces them to be afraid or invested.

I'd much rather the filmmakers and screenwriters work to tell the story creatively, instead of hitting the audience in the face with brutal imagery that forces them to be afraid or invested in a certain plot twist.

Motion Picture Association of America ratings and the effect violence has on child psychology aren’t exactly my field of expertise. But, I will say this: the film that spawned the PG-13 rating – "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" — was my least favorite Indiana Jones film as a child because it was way too scary. As an adult, it’s still my least favorite of the original three films, but mostly because the writing is sloppy and bad. And part of the reason Temple of Doom is so bad is that gore and violence were substituted for real plot development.

Graphic violence is the easy well writers go to when they’re not sure how to make something seem interesting. The damage this does has less to do with desensitizing people to violence — and a lot more to do with audiences getting dumber.



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