What killed the fight scene? | Hacker News Reader

What killed the fight scene?

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20 pointsfzliu57 comments

I 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.

There'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.

I 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

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.

> 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.

i'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.

Sex 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.

if 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.

You 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.

There 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.

you can continue to argue the point, but i will still feel that it could be shot differently and still convey what needs to be conveyed.

i do feel like i should stipulate i am not calling for the ban of sex scenes like i'm some ultra conservative person trying to force my views upon everyone else. i just kind of roll my eyes during these parts of movies and pay more attention to my second screen that the movie is supposed to be vying for my attention from anyways. during these types of scene be it sex/fighting/gore/whatevs, i just tune out until it's over. i just don't find them compelling.

>your audience isn't stupid

Well, I'm not sure I'd make bets on that one.

okay, i concede that point. I am not stupid and resent the belaboring of the point. I know I'm not alone even if closer to a minority percentage.

But why avoid explicitly showing sex?

It's a natural part of life, it's part of the story that's going on, there's no good reason to avoid it.

Because it's boring. You're not going to show anything in a PG-13 movie. Even R rated movies are not going to show much more than softcore. Most actors really do not like having to perform these scenes. Most people like the scenes because they get to see some boob not because it added to the movie in any other way. If people talk about a great sex scene in a movie over any other attribute of the movie, that's not a good bit of commentary on the plot or acting or writing.

If you want to see sex, watch people having sex. Why watch people pretending to have sex?

This feels as bizarre to me as "If you want to see fighting, watch a fight. Why watch people pretending to fight?"

Anything which is part of life should feasibly be part of stories.

Gerald’s Game perhaps? I mean it’s not a sexy sex scene but it really informs us about a character.

Of course many sex scenes are unnecessary, just there to titillate.

You are not alone.

I don't think you're bored with fight scenes because of the execution of the fight scenes, wires or not, it's because most of the time they don't have any emotional resonance or meaning to the movie. Most of the time it's just spectacle/filler.

Good fight scenes should have high stakes, or have you invested in who wins or loses for some reason, not just munching popcorn and appreciating a cool kick or whatever.

It's why the subway fight in The Matrix is so good. We know the stakes. We know both characters. We are invested in Neo's character and journey and want him to win. We know how dangerous the agents have been built up to be. There is a real element of danger, and real exhilaration whenever it seems like Neo is winning. Compare that to the fights in the Fast and the Furious movies, which are completely empty and soulless.

It's the same with sex scenes. If they don't actually serve the story or characters, it's just soft porn, and not the reason I watch a movie. Typically.

I have to re-visit it, because it's been possibly a couple of decades and I don't trust my 20-years-younger self's judgement, but I specifically remember Grosse Point Blank as having particularly 'real' feeling violence.

I 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

I personally prefer the fight in Wheels on Meals https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqYqlDHgKWI

My 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

That and the bath house scene from Eastern Promises (which was also mentioned in the article alongside Raid)

Every 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

> “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.

I'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.

I’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.

How 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.

Arcane (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 :-).

The 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.

I never thought I would yearn for the day of early Steven Seagal movies.

https://youtu.be/4Zu1YIukylw?si=3rkGD74LVvs-4_1R

It was all downhill from his peak work with Global Tetrahedron Pictures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMByDfFMPcE

I 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 ...

He 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.

For that matter, how about Women in Love?

Haven't seen it. Fight? Sex?

Judo/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.

I 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.

I 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

There’s a new movie on Netflix called The Killer. It was awful, but it did have a good fight scene.

I 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.

I 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?

By making the fights backed by emotion and suspense instead of just making them cartoons.

Is 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.

Yep, 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.

>> Jon Jones

I lose all interest in watching drug cheats - the victory means nothing.

Sure, 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.

I figure that the number of professionals writing fight scenes has been stagnant while the number of action movies has risen

Aren’t vastly more scripts written than are made into movies by major studios?

My 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.

You basically also describe American Wrestling, which seems to be a huge industry in itself.

It'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?

It’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.

I'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.

I love the fighting in the movies that you listed. They are cleverly choreographed. I just don’t like when the fighting is just this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb-ZR9DMEcY

I've been watching the western TV series Deadwood (2004) and it's crazy how realistic the fights are. They're often over in an instant -- but if they go on for longer they're mostly awkward flailing on the ground. Characters are left with bruises and cuts on their face for days or longer. If they get shot in the shoulder, their arm is in a sling for several episodes. It's the polar opposite of the "cartoon" choreographed fighting you usually see in films and TV. Nothing glamorous or entertaining about it, but an important part of the story.

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