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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Modern blockbuster movies are already plagued with hectic editing and an overabundance of excuses-for-people-to-be-making-a-helicopter-landing. But some of the Chinese scenes/collaboration have worked out nicely. I can't be the only American ignorant of Chinese cityscapes. The Shanghai scene in "Skyfall" was one of the most movie's visually memorable images. Maybe "Pacific Rim"'s latter half would have taken place in Hong Kong without concern about the Chinese market (its title is Pacific Rim, after all, and a movie about robots beating monsters has a lot of freedom to be in contrived places). But apparently its popularity at the Chinese box office helped pave the way for a sequel, despite its disappointing receipts in the U.S. https://qz.com/110683/pacific-rim-trashed-hong-kong-but-won-...

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Random trivia: significant parts of that Shanghai scene weren't in Shanghai. I did quite a double-take when bond walked off the street in Shanghai and into the lobby of my accountant's tower, here in London.

Other interesting examples:

Longmire, set in Wyoming, never set foot in Wyoming.

The Walking Dead has moved on to Virginia, but it's still filmed here in Georgia. Everyone complains about the grass "being cut," but that's realistic. It just doesn't grow, especially when there's no rain.

No one comments on how weird it is that, early on, the military firebombed downtown Atlanta to give survivors an edge, even though most of the population is out in the suburbs and exurbs. Torching all the population centers along I-85, I-20, and University Parkway would have given more people a clearer path to defensible locations. I don't care because it was a great scene, but it's weird how people's pedantry is rarely informed by actual knowledge.

This kind of thing is nothing new. My first experience with it was when I visited (and stayed in...it turned into a hostel) Luke's uncle's house from the original Star Wars film. I'm not sure why, but I was very surprised that the exterior of the home was shot somewhere else and looked nothing like the real outside of the building (well...hole, since it's dug out of the ground).

Another favorite of mine...anyone familiar with Paris will laugh at the car chase scene from Ronin where they teleport around the city from shot to shot.

This always reminds me that the city of Chongqing has 30m people and most people have never heard of it.

It's closer to 6-7 million: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16761784

Many of the 30 million people who are said to live in the city of Chongqing are actually agricultural workers living in a rural setting, he says.

In fact, he says, the area is so huge it's about the size of Austria.

Hangzhou is 9m in the urban area, and I’d never heard of it when I went to visit a friend there. There are very few points of interest there: it’s a bit like Fresno, only with 20x the population.

I thought Hangzhou was pretty cool. I had heard of it before going because it is famous for its tea. There is a lovely lake and mountain trails for hiking. Cool monastery and other holy places. I took a bike ride out into the tea fields and went to a tea museum too. It's a very popular destination for Chinese tourists, it has a lot of historic significance.

Beijing also. Officially it has 20 million people but less than 10 million are urban. Chinese cities are defined like little states.

When Bond enters the offices in Shanghai there is a Chinese security guard, but the actual office is quite distributive and is just north of Liverpool Street station in London. So does that count as “set in China”

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