Four-Colour Commentary

Action Figures

The whole kung-fu explosion in American movies hit its stride with The Matrix. Sure, we'd had one or two Hong Kong-style action movies before then, a couple of them exported movies from Hong Kong, but The Matrix was the one that stuck, and for good reason. It wasn't just a good action movie, it was a good movie all around. What strikes me about the whole trend is that the novelty of it for Westerners was that the actors did their own fights, and they did them with a skill and a panache that we simply had never seen in American movies. There was no equivalent of Jackie Chan or Jet Li. We all had fond memories of Bruce Lee, of course, but he was an institution unto himself, plus he never used wires. The fun of most of Jet Li's movies, flicks like Once Upon a Time in China and the wonderously mindless Twin Warriors, was that the special effects were all done on-set. That was Li himself jumping around and hanging from the rafters. He just had some help from a wire team. It was a new and exciting comprimise between "the actor really doing it" and "holy fuck that looks so cool I don't even care how they did it!"

So along comes The Matrix, made by the Wachowskis, choreographed by Yun Woo Ping, the guy who did and Fist of Legend (which is a remake of Bruce Lee's The Chinese Connection by the way), and we've got Keanu and Kate and Lawrence all doing kung fu live, on the set. It was so damn cool nobody cared how it was done. Or to be more accurate, it was so damn cool that very few even suspected that they'd used a technique as box-of-rocks simple as hidden wires. See, low-budget Chinese directors realised a long time ago that they needed an edge, they needed to bring the legendary prowess of martial arts masters to the screen. American movies of the 40s used wires to make actors appear to fly or to enhance dance routines. Thank the gods above that Chinese directors thought to themselves, "Hey, we can use this for kung fu." They had found a simple, cheap technique and they have been perfecting it for the past 40 years. They refined it so well that when us Westerners, by then accustomed to movies whose action sequences were done with CG, we all just assumed it was some kind of million-dollar computer thing. At least I did. So Hollywood learned that sometimes the KISS principle (keep it simple, stupid) actually works. It draws audiences. It looks damn cool. It makes money.

But then comes along The Matrix: Reloaded and, what's this? We've switched back to CG and it doesn't look nearly as good. Alexander and Illya Salkind perfected a visual technique of simulating flying for Superman, and that was in the 70s. It's called rotoscoping and it was the standard of the industry for quite some time. That, in conjunction with wire-work and CG backgrounds could have done a lot of the sequences in The Matrix parts II and III. Hell, the wirework on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon directed by Ang Lee and choreographed by good old Yun Woo Ping, still looks better than the Burly Brawl, and that was a no-CG production. In place of that kind of artistic brilliance, we got an action figure instead of an action star. I have to assume there's a good reason why. Perhaps the Wachowskis got really bored of the laborious Bullet Time process. Perhaps someone just gave them too big of a budget (it's brought down better filmmakers than them!). I maintain that the second and third part of the Matrix trilogy are good films, and they get better every time I rewatch them, but they could have been great films, and those great films still haunt my imagination.

But here's the punch line: Hollywood found a simple, beautiful technique for making exciting fight scenes, used it for a few short years, and then abandoned it in favour of something that costs more and generally looks like crap. I'm confused.

Posted by orion at August 12, 2004 3:51 PM