Welcome
back to my mentally challenged world! I mean… my discussion about
fight choreography. In my last post on this subject we discussed the
differences in professionally
trained fighters in movie and television fight scenes verses untrained
actors who busted their tails to learn the trade, and if/how you can
spot the difference. Today we’ll talk about people who punch each other
repeatedly with no damage, fly through the air
and land on a branch with ease, and go through A-Team style bodily harm,
walk away without a scratch and get to kiss the girl/guy. I’m talking
of course about Hollywood fight scenes and their believability verses
how these things actually work in real life.
I
love listening to fight scenes. You are so used to the musical score
and the world of cracks and booms and bangs that the thought of a world
of silent fighting just
makes no sense. Besides, could you take Jet Li movie seriously if signs
kept coming up during the fight that read “BOOM!” “POW!” “PUNCH!” as
if you were watching 1960’s Batman? Probably not. The problem is that
real life will never ever sound like Hollywood.
Look up sound effects videos on YouTube; you will be surprised what
professional and non-professional sound effects editors have used to
make the sounds that you hear in movies every day. I have seen behind
the scenes documentaries that have used raw chickens
being punched or whacked with a bat to simulate the punch sound you hear
when a fist connects. I have seen them rip a head of lettuce or crack a
carrot against a microphone to simulate a bone crunch. Yes…they punish
innocent vegetables for our viewing pleasure,
people. Someone think about the vegetables!
The
visual effects in fight scenes can be equally as interesting. Some are
hysterical and some impressive. I site Mortal Kombat as a movie that
has some of my favorite
fight scenes from both sides of that equation. When that movie came out
I was foaming at the mouth. The soundtrack is one of my favorites in
history, but that’s besides the point; maybe I’ll do a retro review of
it for the blog another day. As a martial
artist I was ready to scream with glee over this flick. I knew that
being a video game based movie there would be a lot that I would have to
suspend belief on in terms of realistic fight dynamics, and I was
right. With the advent of Parkour there has been
a lot to be left to suspend belief on in the ways of free falling,
gymnastics, and flexibility. But when you are in the middle of a real
life fight I promise you that you will not run up to a wall, jump up to
it, push off with your foot, and vault to the side
using the wall as leverage for extra umph on a jumping roundhouse (see
Liu Kang in the Goro’s dinging hall scene.) You won’t jump up in the
air and throw both of your feet into a man’s chest to crack his ribs and
let yourself fall flat on your back, risking
yourself to be attacked if your ridiculous attempt at a cool looking
attack failed miserably (again, see Liu Kang in the first tournament
fight scene.) You won’t swing around a pole like an Olympic gymnast
just to get momentum to kick someone in the face (Johnny
Cage verses Scorpion. Ahh…horribly unrealistic, but still one of the
best fights in the movie.) And I promise that the odds of them spinning
head over feet when you do are slim to none. Body mass and proportion
verses momentum simply don’t work in the attacker’s
favor to realistically pull off that trick. But I have to admit that
the one realistic fight scene for me was Sonya vs. Kano. The speed
annoyed me. It was too slow, but I feel that it could have been because
they were playing it off as Kano toying with Sonya
and/or that in reality Bridgette’s lack of fight training prior to
filming made it a necessity to take things down a notch. But the moves
used in the fight- at least up until Sonya’s famous scissor hold on
Kano’s neck- were practical in any basic fight. I can even forgive the moments she used spinning kicks to lead off an attack just for the fact that everything else worked out so beautifully. More
to the point, they landed one opponent on the ground and vulnerable near
the end of the fight, which I loved seeing. Hitting the ground is
realism. Lack of “beauty” is realism. my next paragraph explains why.
Hollywood
fights are flashy to their core. I love watching them; they’re like a
dance full of the perfect form that you see in any martial arts or
military fighting
style. You can make out the techniques crisply and cleanly and see
exactly where each punch/kick/grapple lands and directs the opponent.
Watch a real life fight and tell me how easy that is. Tell me how long
they stay vertical as well. Statistically, roughly
ninety-eight percent of all fights end up on the ground. When you watch
a show like Arrow or a movie like Rumble In The Bronx, the only ones
hitting the ground are the unconscious bad guys. During the course of
the fight, both people rarely end up on the
ground rolling over each other in a mad grasp for the upper hand to
straddle the other and land punches or in a grappling match. This is
why many schools have began instituting grappling as part of their
training or incorporating a secondary style that focuses
on grappling/rolls/throws as an alternative styles to study or to
singular study. It’s practicality, which you don’t find in action
scenes. Expectation, reality. Hype, real world.
But…they’re still so pretty to watch…
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Yes, this is part of what I've put myself through willingly for twenty years. Ima freak. |
You
hear the stories all the time of adrenaline kicking in to help a
situation. A mother lifts a car off of her child. A man pushes passed
his endurance to survive
the wild. It is possible and there are too many documented stories and
too much scientific and medical proof to discount this. The problem
with these medically documented cases verses Hollywood, however, is that
once the adrenaline wears down- the thing that
keeps you from feeling pain and increases your awareness and strength-
you begin to feel the pain. You begin to wear down physically and
realize that you are in fact injured and you start to feel the damage
that you have sustained…and you will crash hard.
Fiction doesn’t allot for this. Please bear in mind that for all of us
nerds/geeks in the world I am leaving super-powers beings and immortals
out of the equation in this analysis. For regular humans in fight
scenes there seems to be no off switch on their
adrenaline flow. In reality this could be a dangerous thing to the
human body, yet in fiction they seem to be able to weather any damage
dealt to them. At least in Burn Notice, Michael wound up in the
hospital from getting shot. How many times can you count
action movies landing the hero in the hospital? Usually, they kept
going and going and going, only as calling their injuries a “flesh
wound.” There is a reason this was the running gag in “Last Action
Hero,” people. The kicking and punching seems to keep
going without anyone getting winded whatsoever, which I promise you from
tournament experience doesn’t happen regardless of your years of
training. The blood pours from the head, but neither person starts to
get stunned or rattled; they just keep coming as
if the barrage of punches hasn’t even began to make them start thinking
that one plus one equals orange. Again, not the case. And when the
fight is over, the hero who has been beaten to the point that anyone
would be screaming at them to get into an ambulance
simply walks (or limps) away, holding their head high as blood drips
down, choosing to stitch their wounds on their own. Never mind that
that if this had really happened they would have clocked an internal
injury or two. In reality there is an aftermath to
the adrenaline rush. The beating that you took will catch up to you and
you will feel it later. Maybe not immediately, but eventually you will
feel like you were hit by a train and no amount of griping “But it
looks so much easier in the movies!” will change
that. Ah…the beauty of a real-world beating…
I
can site one example that I was happy to see in an action movie that,
for a change, visualized the reality of “adrenaline aftermath.” In
“Rapid Fire,” Brandon Lee’s
character spent the entire movie beating back the mafia men that sought
his life. After the final fight, beaten within an inch of his life,
burned from the fire, probably having singed lungs and cut to ribbons,
he looks away with a stern and angered face…and
then his shoulders slump. His determined face melted in an exhausted
look of “Thank you God that it’s over.” By the end of the movie he, his
best friend, and girlfriend were riding in an ambulance to be treated
for their injuries. As it pulled away Brandon’s
character and the girlfriend leaned their heads back and visibly
breathed sighs of relief that it was all finished as they slumped in the
cab in exhaustion and pain. You just don’t see that realism anymore as
most movies and television give characters that
magic Hollywood ointment that cures theirs injuries in one scene and the
boo-boos are gone by the next episode/scene. Take Demolition Man for
example. Stallone’s character crashes a car off of a freeway into a
huge glass sign, and regardless of “secure foam,”
walks away with no internal injuries. He even manages to go to the
final fight, defeat the villain, walk away from a huge explosion, kiss
the girl and go home happy.
On
that same token, let’s discussed trained fighters as blunt instruments
instead of cars and freeways. Wesley Snipes (the villain in Demolition
Man) is, in reality,
a trained martial artist. What many do not know is that some people
that have spent their entire lives dedicated to the martial arts have
more power in their techniques than most common blunt weapons. Go to
youtube and watch “Fight Science Kick Test” They clock the speed and strength of strikes from
various practitioners of martial arts styles, one of which kicked at a top speed of 136 miles an hour with a Tae Kwon Do roundhouse, clocked with over one ton of power in said kick. On ton. That is more than enough to cause internal injury. That is enough to cause external injury as well and even instant death if aimed at the correct extremity. That
is why the “adrenaline aftermath” is such a huge deal in reality. When
you feel the results of the fight afterwards, you could be “feeling” a
serious medical emergency
you didn’t know you had until afterwards. Makes you wish you lived in a
movie, huh?
Now
I am off to decide if I want to scratch the itch these posts have
created with G.I. Joe, Expendables 3, A-Team, or a Jackie Chan
marathon. I’m out.
Alpha Mike Foxtrot.
Christina Sizemore is trained in only four
things: writing, fighting, paranormal
investigating, and being a mom. At this
point in her life she truly feels that she is not qualified to attempt to learn
any new field. A twenty year martial
artist, mother of three, and writer who is working on the publication of her
first book titled “Finding Your Way: A Guide To Your Path In The Martial Arts,”
she spends her days working out, writing, making fanvids, going to DragonCon,
and playing board games/video games/out in the yard with her kids and husband
who are just as geeky as she is. She is
convinced that one day her skills will be of assistance in the Zombie
Apocalypse and that while she is of no use in the kitchen, she can Buffy that
zombie for ya or teach you the best way to get the blood stains out of your
clothes (Psst…the secret is mixing Crown Cleaner and Shout. Just sayin’.)
Most entertaining fight in the movie.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9iFfwUps5k
Still, it's no Tokyo Raiders apartment fight...
Fighting games have a propensity to bypass the storyline, and this game is no exception to that rule. Taruhan Bola
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