5. The Human Body Is As Flexible As Cooked Spaghetti
Culprits Catwoman, the Matrix Reloaded, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King This is a very common error of judgement. Filmmakers can pour hours of time and piles of production cash into their epic climactic fight scene, but Rule #1 should always be to make your subject physically plausible. Take the most glaring example: The Matrix Reloaded. Fans of the first film flooded cinemas to see the epic second part to one of the greatest action films of the last two decades. Not only was the overall result quite lacking, but the climactic Burly Brawl was ruined by the horrific CGI Smiths. Watching their almost shapeless masses being repelled by a pole, wielded by a Keanu Reeves action figure, was a disturbing, disappointing event. Catwoman birthed similar monstrosities, as the titular cat burglar leapt from wall to wall like a rectangle only to morph back into a terrible Halle Berry render. Coupled with Berrys terrible performance in the shots where she wasnt a human noodle, the film was simply dire. When you are filming a fight scene there should only be one guideline: Dont get in over your head. Otherwise youll find yourself spawning in more enemies than a video game (with similar graphics, coincidentally) or trying to pull off unfeasible moves that only a dose of expensive CGI can make truly realistic. X2s fantastic opening scene with Nightcrawler storming the White House showed how this sort of thing should have been handled with as little computer modelling as possible. Put simply humans have bones. There is a limit to how far these bones will move and flex. If you overstep this limit, youll break something. Computer models should be no exception.