Blockbuster: how Hollywood learned to stop worrying and love the summer Tom Shone Simon & Schuster, 340pp, £18.99 ISBN 0743239903

Blockbusters are all about amplification: of budgets that would fund the film industries of many smaller countries; of booming, multichannel sound that crashes out of every speaker in the movie theatre; of media- saturation campaigns so prone to overkill and blanket bombing that they invite war metaphors; of splurgy action sequences born of testosterone-fuelled imaginations and computer-generated imagery. They represent genetically modified, supersize cinema: in one end and out the other, succulent and filling, but still able to leave you just as hungry as when you first started.

Tom Shone would have us believe that such resistance is mere snobbery, that it is elitism masquerading as critical engagement. His study of blockbusters is a spirited and intelligent account of their emergence during the 1970s. Cinema attendances in the US had been falling year after year. Then, according to Shone, along came a trio of directors - Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and James Cameron - who between them revived the art of popular cinema. Shone calls Star Wars "that one bold, brilliant thing that exerted an influence on American movies like no other since The Birth of a Nation". He describes Spielberg as the "one director of the past 25 years in whose work the medium of film was most fully itself".

That these are not critical orthodoxies is clear from the space Shone devotes to teasing the Sight and Sound crowd, those aficionados who prefer to pass their hours "in the dark confines of the art house" and, especially, to the American writer Peter Biskind. In his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Biskind championed bad-boy directors such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Paul Schrader and Robert Altman. In a string of tough, bleak films such as Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, these directors tapped into the counter-cultural energies of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and pointed a mirror at downturning, recessionary America.

This kind of movie-making - aimed at adults, rooted in realism and infused with the maverick sensibilities of its makers - was driven off screens, Biskind believes, by the high-tech candyfloss of Spielberg and Lucas. Shone argues otherwise. He points out that many of the films that Biskind admires were of minority interest at the time, outstripped at the box office by milder fare such as Love Story and Airport. What is more, the appeal of Easy Rider or The French Connection owed less to their hard-boiled grunginess or their outlaw sentiments than to generic elements: car chases, highway cruising. Nor did these films have a monopoly of political symbolism. In an echo of the cultural-studies exegeses he derides elsewhere, Shone describes Raiders of the Lost Ark as "Reaganomics incarnate: its keynote was economy - economy of budget, economy of gesture, economy of joke".

Even though Shone has interviewed all the directors he praises, he rarely elicits very revealing comments from them. But he is good on the way that blockbusters have changed American film culture. Movies are made on the basis of merchandising potential, their "toyetic quality". The production schedules for these toys are so tight and important that directors are often precluded from making last-minute changes to their films. The studios force cinemas to book their films in large blocks of up to 12 weeks, a practice that has brought many chains to the brink of insolvency. They threaten to withdraw advertising from papers that don't back their products enthusiastically. It gets worse: the $600,000 trailer for Godzilla, a film later disowned by its makers even though it made $375m, was screened at cinemas before any of the movie had been shot.

Shone is rightly wary of such developments. However, because of his desire to cock a snook at film writers whom he regards as churls, and his largely uncritical attitude to the big names he has been so successful in gussying up to, the book ultimately reads as an endorsement of one of the most dulled and dehydrated strains of recent American cinema. He seems content that art-house directors such as Christopher Nolan and Darren Aronofsky go off and prop up the Hollywood system by making blockbusters. He shows little concern for the fate of quieter films, such as Kenneth Lonergan's wonderful You Can Count On Me, which are neither indie nor studio megaliths.

So Blockbuster is the "I'd Rather Jack" of movie books. That 1989 song, written by Stock, Aitken and Waterman and chanted by a duo called the Reynolds Girls, included the immortal lines: "Golden oldies, Rolling Stones/We don't want them back/I'd rather jack than Fleetwood Mac." The cattiness of the lyrics was marvellously insouciant. The only problem was that, even though Fleetwood Mac may indeed have been boring old farts, you felt you'd probably rather listen to them than to the ghastly hi-NRG bubbliness of the Reynolds Girls.

The best film writers are animated by what cinema could be as much as what it is. They make you want to see the films they write about. Mark Cousins, in his excellent Story of Film, does that: Shone, for all his energy and wit, does not. Would you trust anyone who regards Die Hard as "one of the best films of the Eighties"? Back to the Future was the first non-Hindi film I ever saw at a cinema, so I have a special fondness for it; but even as a boy, I felt it to be too streamlined and vacuum-wrapped. Shone describes it as "filigree-silver chewing-gum wrap - 24-carat popcorn". Popcorn, however, is still popcorn. After a certain age, you really ought to grow out of it.

Sukhdev Sandhu is the author of London Calling: how black and Asian writers imagined a city (HarperCollins)

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