A proper firing stance. |
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So I was watching Ghosts of Mars last night, and while leading with that undoubtedly hurts my credibility as it's a film that struggles to be compared favorably to steaming brown, straw-laden horse orbs, it wasn't the first time that I wondered if amongst the entire production there was no one that had ever seen a gun used, much less actually fired one at any point. It's not as if Ghosts of Mars could've been reclaimed from the dumpster with this one technical refinement, but it's indicative of an overall lack of attention to the details which, as they say, the devil is in.
For starters, a gun, or any weapon for that matter, should be treated in most cases as another piece of the character's wardrobe. What I mean by that is that it's another opportunity to tell the audience something about the character. In Unforgiven, for instance, Clint Eastwood's William Munny practices with a revolver, but he's old, out of practice, and burdened with bad eyesight and can't hit anything; he comes to the conclusion to use a double-barreled shotgun. They parallel each other as brutally efficient.
On the flipside of appropriately matching character to gun, segueing into the idea of the proper firing stance, is the 'style' that has been popularized in ridiculous movies and video games, that of dual-wielding submachine guns. While I do not expect nor wish to see all film characters exclusively and constantly firing from the proper stance, if you were to fire a submachine gun one-handed you might be able to hit the side of a barn and not much else. In 3000 Miles to Graceland when Ice-T enters a fire-fight hanging upside down from a rope, arms extended, a blazing submachine gun in each hand, the only way he's going to kill anybody is if they die from a fit of laughter or get sucked into a reality paradox vortex. This shot was replicated in Punisher: War Zone, and was used tongue in cheek in Boondock Saints.
It's not that hard to shoot someone or something if you're at least standing on your own two feet, even if what you're shooting at is moving, but people flying through the air and shooting at people can't realistically hit anything. This would include firing at a moving car from a moving car (and yet, somehow, that poor rearview mirror is always a casualty), or from, say, the door of a helicopter. There's a reason Blackhawk and Osprey door-gunners use mounted mini-guns, the concept being similar to old-world musket warfare; hurl enough crap in that direction and you'll hit something. This philosophy has some merit when you fire a thousand rounds, not so much when you fire thirty.
One of firearms' foremost reality offenders, John Woo, could defend his universe in which guns don't function while both feet 
"Don't let your feet touch the ground or your gun won't work!" |
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are on the ground and flips improve accuracy as a style choice until Wind Talkers came out. Aside from the melodrama and crappy acting, Wind Talkers features the most amateur of firearm usage by embarrassingly phony United States Marines spraying, praying, and firing from the hip. Outside his comfort zone, Woo could not direct a realistic action sequence, not unlike asking most porn 'directors' to film a love scene.
Another movie that displays this Woo-style of firearm shenanigans is the overly-ballyhooed Desperado, which features Antonio Banderas emphatically flinging his handguns at people while firing them, as if it will make the bullets come out faster. This is only slightly less ridiculous than Hot Shots! Part Deux when Charlie Sheen hurls a fistful of bullets at his enemies because he lacks the time to reload; only Desperado is operating under the pretense of being at least partially serious.
I harangue films that eschew reality for what they (wrongly) perceive as cool-factor outside of the established laws of their universe; thus, it's okay if you do silly gun-fu crap in the Matrix, because the film actually has a virtual time-out thirty minutes into the movie where Morpheus explains to Neo (and the audience) that while in the Matrix things work differently. In Terminator, the title character is a highly-advanced piece of machinery; given the state of our targeting systems in today's military, it's not unrealistic within the context of the Terminator that he could fight with a shotgun in one hand and an automatic rifle in the other. In fact, at times it almost seems more unrealistic that he misses as much as he does.
The importance of applying some form of reality, law, or guideline actually takes sharper focus the more fantastic the subject matter becomes. As it applies to this specific topic, consider that in the original Star Wars, Stormtroopers were using modified British Sterling L2A3 submachine guns, while Harrison Ford holstered an altered German Mauser C-96 pistol. In Aliens, the Colonial Marines' "M-41a Pulse Rifle" was actually a Thompson submachine gun with part of a shotgun welded underneath its barrel to simulate a grenade launcher. If you don't know anything about guns, you probably don't think you give a crap about any of this, but it's likely that even if you didn't realize it, those guns were familiar to you, and at the very least, there was a reality that couldn't be denied because they were real.
In addition to that, if you enjoy film as I do and appreciate the nuances of acting, human connection, and truth, you want to be mesmerized by this other time and place and not have the spell broken - sometimes subconsciously - by actors 
Something looks familiar... |
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failing to react to something that they should. It's not their fault; an actor can only react to so many things that aren't actually there.
When Natalie Portman runs out onto the platform accompanied by a half-dozen clonetroopers to shoot at the escaping Count Dooku at the end of Attack of the Clones, she's standing on a green-screen stage, surrounded by no one, and shooting at a piece of tape on a wall (if that). All she has to work with outside her imagination is her attire and the phony polystyrene hairdryer posing as her firearm. Not coincidentally, she holds it like a hairdryer - the prop isn't even a freaking cap gun, so there's no proper heft to it (even if it is weighted with metal slugs) and certainly isn't going to kick (unlike the firearms used in the original Star Wars trilogy).
Regardless of how you feel about the movie itself, if you watch Daredevil, there's a part where Jennifer Garner fires a pistol while wearing a strapless dress. You can see her entire shoulder shivering with each discharge of the weapon; that's what it's like to fire a gun, not the infantile "pew pew" we all did when we played with toy guns as kids.
Obviously there is going to be some dramatic license, but the overall use, performance, and even the handling of guns is so unnecessarily lame as to unintentionally break the fourth wall. Aside from the obvious nonsense like Cobra, Commando, and Prisoners of War (I have a friend who served as an MP in the Air Force who spit up his drink when Norris erupted from underwater with an M-60 - and fired it), there are even relatively well-respected movies that disregard what firearms are and can do.
While not so much about a gun, in Blackhawk Down, like so many other movies, we are subjected to RPG and LAW rockets soaring majestically through the air at about the speed that most people drive. The problem is that even if you are a psychotically unsafe driver, there's no way you're matching the M72 Light Anti-tank Weapon's muzzle velocity of 150-200 miles per second. If you were to shoot one of these across the length of football field, the effect is instantaneous. Let's give Ridley Scott some credit though, he didn't pull a Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever in which a rocket came out of a grenade launcher. (The only weapon usage that I can think of that's more ludicrous than that would be the opening sequences of the made for TV movie Merlin in which a man throws an axe that flies across the room - without tumbling end over end.)
In Terminator 2, Sarah Conner is wounded in the shoulder before she does her epic one-handed shotgun pump several times in a row as she attempts to drive the T-1000 into the molten whatever. Now, shoulder injuries 
This has nothing to do with guns. |
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can render the entire arm rather useless, leaving poor Sarah not much else to do with it but pull the trigger, but there's a problem. She's firing a SPAS-12 which is a semi-automatic shotgun; that means she doesn't need to pump it to load the next slug.
If one no longer needs to pump most shotguns, they certainly do not need to pump them multiple times. In a light editing snafu, I seem to recall Max Payne shooting someone with a shotgun and pumping it to eject the spent slug. He then walks to the next room and pumps it again to threaten someone, which would've ejected an unspent slug. This is all in that same category with the cocking of automatic pistols and pulling back the hammer; I understand the theory of the slightly increased tension involved with these activities, but since they are so cliche at this point it's kind of silly if you think about it.
I think what the deal is that most actors and directors don't really know crap about guns and base to majority of their decisions on what looks cool which is based on what they saw in other movies. Every now and then, when someone puts a gun to someone's head and threatens to kill them if they don't tell them what they want to know, it'd be nice if when the captive starts to say anything but what the captor wants to know, there was no pulling back the hammer or cocking of the gun but just instance spaghetti on the wall behind them (though admittedly guns don't make nearly the mess in real life as they do in movies).
I suppose that any discussion about guns in the movies would be incomplete without discussing knockback and reloading. Reloading, or more to the point not reloading, doesn't generally bother me so long as I see it once or twice, as there are generally a lot of cuts in action sequences and it shouldn't take an experienced shooter more than 3-4 seconds to reload an automatic weapon. As for the knockback that occurs in movies due to the sheer awesomeness of shotguns, .45s, or the revered magnum, it is a myth, but not so bad so long as you don't overdo it ala Last Man Standing where we see a man catapulted about 30 yards out a set of doors and into the middle of the street at the hands of a pair of .45 automatics.
I don't hate movies that screw up gun physics, but it can be hard to take them seriously at times. Usually, a movie that screws up the use of guns makes so many other, far more severe blunders that these are just footnotes, as is certainly the case with Ghosts of Mars. I don't hate movies because they screw up one thing, but when everyone gets uppity about accents or the fact that William Wallace is wearing woad, or that stirrups didn't exist back then, just remember that Sarah Connor pumping a Spas-12 with one hand is every bit as inaccurate.
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| Thom Williams |
Thom is both a maker and lover of films. He loves, and makes, films of all kinds. He is often as surprised by what he likes as by what he creates himself; Thom entered film school with a distaste for silent, black and white, and foreign films, yet left having made one of each. He likes what he likes and make no apologies for his opinions.
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