Coming on the heels of my last essay on Atheism and intelligence not being corroborated, I have a new underlying thought, which is that those who prefer action movies are more intelligent than those who do not.

If you know anything about intelligence, it is thought that those that have it, tend to handle complexity better. A complex thing is defined as 1. More than one part. 2. Something more difficult to comprehend. We’re going to use both to make my point.

Anyone that knows even a small bit about directing knows that a scene is comprised of multiple shots. Usually a master shot, on tv this is the hard camera and then multiple shots around that, which on tv is floor men walking around that you cut back and forth between.

Most movies would therefore have a small amount of complexity and consistently keep a similar pacing. An action sequence can contain up to a thousand micro shots all compiled to make up a few short minutes of film. Therefore we can conclude that if only intelligence people can handle complexity, action movies would be preferred by more intelligent individuals.

Furthermore, less intelligent individuals often have people bents. So something that is more character driven, would be preferred by less intelligent people. These movies often feature more exposition, also known as “talking”. Essentially, the movie with excess speaking is doing your thinking for you. There are exceptions to this rule, though. World building comes to mind so that we understand a world rules, so we believe it better.

To follow up with the above, if a movie features more exposition, it’s no longer a visual movie and movies are a visual medium. A part of full literacy is understanding context, especially visual context, also known as emotional intelligence. If lower literacy rates equate to lower intelligence, then that, too, would suggest that people who prefer action movies are more intelligent.

So the next time you feel guilty about putting in that Micheal Bay 4k transfer, remember that it just might make you more intelligent.