5 ms·
What killed the fight scene?
- runnr_az 3y agoI feel bad for modern filmmakers trying to compete with the classics. Hobbs and Shaw packed in so much fighting that they had to show it in split screen. How ya gonna top that?
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoBy making the fights backed by emotion and suspense instead of just making them cartoons.
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- PrimeMcFly 3y agoFeminism has nothing to do with fight scenes becoming less common, and even less to do with the fight scenes in the moves you try to use as examples.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoYou mean, aside from five out of five of those characters being women, feminist icons, and members of entire nations of exclusively female warriors? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonder_Woman#Feminist_icon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonder_Woman#Feminist_icon If your stable of film stars consists of many fighting women, how do you stage fist-fights between a man and a woman in ways that will not trigger victims of domestic abuse and violence? I suppose it is OK for Grand Theft Auto, but action films need to appeal to wide audiences and the general public.
- PrimeMcFly 3y ago> You mean, aside from five out of five of those characters being women, feminist icons, and members of entire nations of exclusively female warriors? Yeah. That's all entirely irrelevant.
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- readthenotes1 3y agoI always figured it was greed and laziness that killed the fight scene and thus prompted them to always happen in such a dark zone that you could barely make out what was happening. Jackie Chan otoh ...
- dmonitor 3y agoI figure that the number of professionals writing fight scenes has been stagnant while the number of action movies has risen
- sokoloff 3y agoAren’t vastly more scripts written than are made into movies by major studios?
- altairprime 3y agoEvery Frame A Painting asserted a few years ago that western action movies were suffering greatly for a specific change in how the cut the hits altogether. It’s worth watching in full, or skip to 5 minutes in: https://vimeo.com/113439313 https://vimeo.com/113439313 > “By contrast, American editing doesn’t show the hit at all.” So it’s plausible that audiences desire more movies like John Wick, where actors take the hits, where it feels like actual action occurred — while the ‘fake it’ capabilities have advanced so far that they create all the tension without any if the resolution that makes it worthwhile.
- aidenn0 3y agoI'll both agree and disagree; I find the double-shot cut of the hit is a bit overused in HK cinema. As an analogy it's like choosing between food with no salt and food that's a bit too salty.
- altairprime 3y agoI’m only gesturing at the overuse-absence of “someone took the hit” as the causative defect in the american approach here, not promoting HK-style frame doubling as a cure. The contrast is quite helpful for conveying an oft-unseen nuance that supports this post’s points about fight scenes.
- hax0ron3 3y agoI miss squibs. Doesn't seem like they use them as much nowadays as they used to. There's nothing like a classic fight scene where a guy gets shot and the actor flails around wildly while red liquid erupts from an actual physical object that is under his clothing. CGI is also kind of a mess. It's been around for decades now and it still looks off a lot of the time. There are subtleties of how physical objects interact with each other and with light that our subconscious minds are good at detecting and which CGI has trouble convincingly crafting. As for modern puritanism, I do find it funny that the Hays Code emerged in Hollywood at about the same time as comic books became wildly successful, and modern puritanism is also accompanied by a huge rise of the popularity of comic book derived media. It might be more than a coincidence.
- sharkjacobs 3y agoI stopped going to theatres when, yknow, and never really started again so I don't see as many new releases as I once did, but The Killer came out this year and had a great, well choreographed, fight scene.
- dylan604 3y agoi'm a weirdo, but fight scenes have become so outlandish that i'm just beyond bored with them. if you can't film the fight scene with a well trained actor to the point that wires and other trickery are involved, then i'm just over it. just to reiterate the level of weirdo, i'm really over elaborate sex scenes. they do nothing for the story. great, they had sex. we get it. if i want to see sex, there's plenty of free porn available. i'm watching a movie because i enjoy things like plots, dialog, and well acted scenes. i don't look for those things in porn, so why am i expected to be looking for porn in a movie? i have yet to see a sex scene that made me think it did anything for the movie.
- hax0ron3 3y agoSex scenes make sense when seduction and sex are a big component of the movie's theme or plot. Like in erotic thrillers, for example. How people have sex tells us something about them.
- dylan604 3y agoif you as a writer and/or director can't make that point without explicitly showing sex, then.... your audience isn't stupid, and they only resent you for belaboring the point.
- ipqk 3y agoYou could say the same thing about violent scenes, or pretty much kind of scene. they do nothing for the story. great, they had a fight. we get it. if i want to see violence, there's plenty of free snuff films out there. i'm watching a movie because i enjoy things like plots, dialog, and well acted scenes. i don't look for those things in snuff films, so why am i expected to be looking for snuff films in a movie? i have yet to see a fight scene that made me think it did anything for the movie.
- hax0ron3 3y agoThere are plot points that would naturally happen during sex. For example, a character accidentally blurting out a secret in a moment of passion. Or using the other person's lust-filled single-minded focus to distract, deceive, or betray them in the heat of the moment. Or you might want to show a different side of a character that only comes out occasionally. Maybe the character is normally reserved but becomes wild during sex. Or they are normally distant but become intimate during sex. My point is that sex scenes are not always just crowd-pleasing filler that is extraneous to the rest of the movie. A good writer and/or director could probably make pretty much any point without explicitly showing sex, but why not just do it while explicitly showing sex? Sex is a part of real human life after all, so it would be strange if the only movies that showed sex were pornos.
- nicbou 3y agoMy movie buff friend pointed out that a lot of fight scenes are just a plot dice roll. The punching is pointless and has no effect on the characters until the plot has to move on. So you just watch people getting kicked through brick walls until the plot dictates that punches now register as damage, dice roll, one guy loses. Yawn.
- diggan 3y agoYou basically also describe American Wrestling, which seems to be a huge industry in itself.
- majormajor 3y agoIt's dancing for entertainment's sake, not for plot sake. How many people enjoy a given fight scene depends on how well it's done. A thousand movies could have the "hero gets beaten up initially, hero trains, now hero wins" plot series and be wildly different in execution quality and entertainment value. But that's fine. Good, even? If you can turn "John Wick searches for the bad guy in a club in NYC" into ten minutes of entertainment then you deserve to have success. I'm also not as pessimistic about the last couple of decades of moviemaking in that regard either. Some are good, a lot are dreck, but were 80s and 90s action movies all crushing it or do we just have rose-tinted memories since we remember the classics more than the also-weres? Even the article says "it wasn’t really until The Matrix arrived in 1999 that American audiences started wanting the kind of fight scenes you’d see in niche cult classics like Eastern Promises and They Live! or Asian cinema like The Raid and Oldboy" - so what's so unusual about post-2008 compared to pre-1999?
- nicbou 3y agoIt’s fine if the dancing is good, which it often is. I thoroughly enjoy a good fight scene. But the Avengers? The fighting seems so pointless.
- echelon 3y agoI'm at the point where watching backroom political discourse feels better than watching two dudes fight. Kung Fu, old school Jackie Chan, the Matrix, Marvel Superhero flicks, John Wick... (yawn) Just give me an intriguing plot, great character arcs, and phenomenally talented, good-looking actors. That's all I want. Save the glycerine fight scenes, plot MacGuffins, world-ending stakes, and mystery boxes for the twelve year olds.
- bluedino 3y agoI never thought I would yearn for the day of early Steven Seagal movies. https://youtu.be/4Zu1YIukylw?si=3rkGD74LVvs-4_1R https://youtu.be/4Zu1YIukylw?si=3rkGD74LVvs-4_1R
- defrost 3y agoIt was all downhill from his peak work with Global Tetrahedron Pictures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMByDfFMPcE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMByDfFMPcE
- reidjs 3y agoThere’s a new movie on Netflix called The Killer. It was awful, but it did have a good fight scene.
- charred_patina 3y agoI am pretty sure in anime that you have specific studios and directors who direct and animate fight scenes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yutaka_Nakamura https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yutaka_Nakamura Is one who comes to mind. It requires a specialist and costs an outsized amount of money per frame compared to regular scenes. In western live action films it requires a director who intentionally wants to emulate that style and a studio that is willing to spend the money to do so. The incentives probably aren't aligned for big blockbusters to have well-choreographed fight scenes anymore. There is obviously still an appetite for well choreographed fight scenes, but they are in the new Western feature-length animation projects (Spiderverse, Puss in Boots), probably because this generation of directors and animators grew up watching Yutaka Nakamura's fight scenes or RWBY. But IMO asking why so much new media has bad fight scenes is like asking why so much new media has poor writing. It's a commodity that people probably didn't care about that much.
- aidenn0 3y ago> Yutaka Nakamura's fight scenes or RWBY My wife isn't big on fight scenes. Or animation. However, even she loves the food-fight scene at the beginning of RWBY season 2.
- AlbertCory 3y agoHe mentioned Eastern Promises: now that was choreography! Two naked guys fighting and rolling around on the floor, and somehow no private parts are ever glimpsed.
- cafard 3y agoFor that matter, how about Women in Love?
- AlbertCory 3y agoHaven't seen it. Fight? Sex?
- cafard 3y agoJudo/wresting match. Alan Bates and Oliver Reed were the actors. At the moment, I can remember the name only of Reed's character, Gerald. Bates played the Lawrence stand-in.
- palata 3y agoArcane (Fortiche's animated series in the League of Legend world) has really good fight scenes, I find. Animated, though, which is slightly beside the point of the article. But I must say it felt really good to see good fights like this :-).
- aidenn0 3y agoI always thought the rise of MMA had something to do with the decline of fight-scenes. There's not a whole lot of spinning jump kicks and stuff when you put two people in a cage to fight. I don't know how that might relate to Wuxia (and Wuxia-inspired) fight scenes though that don't even attempt to look realistic. Certainly, as TFA states, the overreliance of Marvel movies on CGI for action shots (and their financial success while doing so) probably played a big part. I'll end with a link to one of my all-time favorite choreographed fight scenes (Though the fight between Donnie Yen and Wu Jing in Kill Zone is up there too): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BVZl_sn-gg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BVZl_sn-gg
- defen 3y agoI personally prefer the fight in Wheels on Meals https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqYqlDHgKWI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqYqlDHgKWI
- throwup238 3y agoMy favorite is the machete gang fight scene from The Raid: Redemption which has some incredible finishing moves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8j5IA0L_MI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8j5IA0L_MI That and the bath house scene from Eastern Promises (which was also mentioned in the article alongside Raid)
- js2 3y agoI don't know if They Live's fight scene is the best fight scene, but it's certainly the most entertaining I've seen: https://youtu.be/dN8Z7y_QcwE?si=MvxQ4rKaD0yZ4r1F https://youtu.be/dN8Z7y_QcwE?si=MvxQ4rKaD0yZ4r1F
- andrewstuart 3y agoIs it the rise of real fighting on Youtube? UFC, kickboxing, karate fighting etc etc. Movie fight scenes are far less entertaining when you can flick over and see the real thing.
- jjackson5324 3y agoYep, a lot of people haven't realized how insanely popular UFC has gotten. It has a larger worldwide fanbase than baseball & NFL since every culture understands fighting (whereas a russian or chinese person probably doesn't know the rules of NFL or baseball). Movie fight scenes seem a lot less entertaining when I can see a Jon Jones fight. People are also learning a lot more about the art of fighting and because of that movie scenes just seem ridiculous.
- andrewstuart 3y ago>> Jon Jones I lose all interest in watching drug cheats - the victory means nothing.
- jjackson5324 3y agoSure, I don't like drug cheats either. But if you're actually interested in the fighting, then his style is one of the most interesting & creative.
- brenainn 3y agoI thought Bloodhounds (K-drama on Netflix) had some of the best fight scenes I'd seen in years. I'm not a big k-drama or even drama person but I came for the fights and ended up liking the characters. There's a weird character write-off towards the end because apparently the actress had a DUI accident and so they took her off the show, but otherwise it's a pretty solid show.
- devindotcom 3y agoThere's plenty of good fights out there recently... this writer just hasn't watched them. Korea is putting out a ton of great action. Obviously stuff like Oldboy and Man From Nowhere, but watch The Yellow Sea, or the recent Netflix show Bloodhounds and be amazed (though the ending kinda falls off a cliff). Worst of Evil too, some solid stuff in there. The Japanese show Avalanche had some amazing ones, and the movie Hell Dogs. China's Longest Day in Chang'an has a lot of good fights and is visually one of the best shows in years. Ip Man and countless other martial or wuxia films (though the vibes are different)... Raging Fire (last fight was amazing), anything with Donnie Yen. Indonesia and Thailand are out here too with a lot of lower budget stuff. This is all just off the top of my head. Admittedly that's all SE Asia, US sensibilities tend more toward gunplay since in this country people pull a gun out when someone looks at them wrong. There's no martial tradition. But film and TV is global now - the US outlook on fights was, frankly, never that great. It took people like Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan to come in and liven things up. If you want good fights, you just have to look outside Hollywood. In a way that's always been true.
- pimlottc 3y agoHow in the world can you have an essay about well-choreographed fight scenes and not even mention Jackie Chan?!? While he mostly worked in Hong Kong, he had a strong cult following in the US and eventually came to Hollywood. He made a number of successful action-comedy films in America, starting with Rush Hour in 1998, one year before The Matrix come out. Certainly the Matrix had a huge effect, that's undeniable, but Jackie Chan was very influential as well. While he rose to fame shooting films in Hong Kong, he had a strong cult following in the US that eventually brought him to Hollywood, where he had a successful run of films made a number of successful films, such as Rush Hour and Shanghai Noon.
- glitchc 3y agoThe author's mistaken. It never died, he just stopped watching them. Beyond those mentioned in TFA, Stallone, Statham, Diesel, and Johnson have been making movies all this time. In terms of franchises, Bond's been around for 60 years and always includes at least one fight scene. Mission Impossible's been around for 40, Rocky/Creed and Rambo. New classics include Bullet Train, likely going to get a sequel. The list goes on.