I think it's important to remember what we have stored away in parentheses
when we say things like "what the Matrix did was to really raise the bar in
terms of action sequences"--we mean that it did so within the domain of
American action films. I'm not saying this to suggest the banal observation
that much of what was exciting in The Matrix's fight scenes were the
excitement of Yuen Woo Ping and Hong Kong fight scenes--which would more or
less end up in calling The Matrix a sort of Elvis of martial arts movies.
There are a number of films with fight scenes that are exciting in the way
The Matrix's fight scenes are exciting--Drunken Master, Once Upon a Time in
China, Fist of Legend; what is important to say is not that these things
came first, but why, with these movies having predated The Matrix, we did
not then (five years ago or so) think of them as making American martial
arts movies irrelevant. The obvious reason--the probably correct but
probably least interesting reason--is logistical: these films were old,
cheaper and Asian, while the higher funded and glossier Matrix and we are
both American. Another way to look at this is to look at The Matrix as a
translation of this sort of Hong Kong aesthetics: the entire existence of
the training room and this alternate virtual dimension have the important
narratological side effect of "allowing" martial arts tropes (giant leaps,
fast speed, swirling kicks) to exist while still being permitted by the
"rules" of the story. That is--while some American audiences complained that
Crouching Tiger never "explained" why the characters could fly, The Matrix
explains these things by saying that these are merely representations.
Interestingly, this incapsulates what was already the origin of this type of
choreography in Chinese films: the trashiest sword and fantasy movie or John
Woo flick peppered with somersaults are really reinventions of Peking Opera
and theater like a bracketed virtual reality is a game of representations.
Incidentally there's an interesting discussion of HK vs. American fight
scenes in _Planet Hong Kong_, where the author compares shot break downs of
a scene in Die Hard with one from Once Upon a Time in China. The description
of Die Hard is exactly how you describe Spiderman, while the author notes
that in the final scene of Once Upon a Time, there were 300 cuts, many of
which were done to accentuate certain angles, etc. I don't have the book
with me, so I can't describe it in any useful way, but it might be more
useful to say that the Matrix didn't "raise the bar"--which suggests a sort
of quantitative increase--but offered a different way. As they would say in
left-wing postmodernism or right-wing corporate-guru-isms: a paradigm-shift.
I think you can say that the Die Hard/Spiderman-way isn't inherently worse,
it just has a greater emphasis on, for example, realism. That having been
said, it's interesting to watch action movies that are post-Matrix (like
Charlie's Angels and Brotherhood of the Wolf) because they appropriate these
martial arts scenes but from both a narrative and a cinematographic point of
view, do not seem to know how to do it. For example, neither movie
"explains" why these characters know martial arts and when they do do the
high kicks and so on, the framing looks awkward as the movie doesn't quite
know how to frame the shot. What I would suggest is that this leads to an
unintentional postmodernism: it's impossible to watch these movies without
believing that they are pastiches of The Matrix.
KC
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