After being bombarded with action flick after action flick, do you ever wonder what justifies a decent fight scene? There is no perfect fight scene, it is based on personal preference, which is generally drawn from a few points:
- How realisticly violence is portrayed. Admit it, we are all gorehounds to some degree.
- The athletic ability portrayed by the actors. This is why Jackie Chan is the man, he had a low tech old school approach and had
- How well the fighting style represents the characters that use them. I don’t think it would have made sense for Leonidas to use Tai Chi, or for Ozymandias to fight like a bar room brawler.
- A feeling of representativeness with the style. How many people that train muay thai loved Ong Bak? It is always nice to root for the home team.
Any of these reasons are great ones. The point here is to get people to think about why they like what they do.
Recently I had the privilege of viewing a movie that represented something close to one of the Martial Arts that I train and love, Wing Tsun. The movie was “Ip man” (they have a neat website too) which bears the name of one of the great grandmasters of the style but is far from a biographical account. Here is a trailer for those unfamiliar:
Ip Man, the main character uses very direct and efficient fighting technique which I can definitely appreciate as it is the focus of my training as well, so there is definitely a sense representativeness that is felt between myself and the character. That was enough to get me to watch the darn thing but what I really enjoyed about it was the way they tied his character to the style, he was always quick to the point, held his own space and only did what was necessary.
Part one has provided framework for the next few posts which will be showing examples of fight scense and how they relate to the topics above.