#let things have an actual impact which ripples through the whole narrative and AFFECTS the characters

[beady-burmese-blog]

Science Fact or Cinematic Fiction

Over the past century, Hollywood has provided us with a wide variety of film narratives both fictional and historic. The big-budget movie industry has been a massive source of entertainment world-wide, providing us with countless hours of visual content, opening our eyes to new ideas. Films introduce us to new concepts, educating us about things we’ve never observed ourselves. A side effect to this is the spreading of misinformation. The thing about film-making is that things need to be dramatic in order to look good on camera; most of the things we do in life don’t look visually appealing. A lot of Hollywood filmmaking is glitz and glamour, everything is seen through a romantic lens so that it’s pleasant to look at, it’s mostly art after all. When it comes to action films in particular, the harsh visuals of a real-world gunfight don’t fit through the Hollywood filter, there needs to be spice and drama to fit on the silver screen. Thus, Hollywood gun physics were born, an amalgamation of inaccurate physics and silly tropes that spread out from the cinema and now plague all forms of media.

To begin, let’s dive into one of the largest pulls for action movie tropes in the modern world: 1987’s Lethal Weapon. This is the classic buddy cop flick of the eighties; Roger Murtaugh, an aged by-the-books police officer is just trying to get by quietly as retirement approaches, but he’s partnered up with Martin Riggs, a hot-headed shoot ‘em up cop who has nothing to lose. Soon enough, the two crack open a conspiracy and start blasting away bad guys, blowing up cars and performing shirtless karate fights on suburban lawns; all of which is perfectly timed to jazzy musical cues. As expected from a movie of this era, Lethal Weapon is filled with as many physical inaccuracies as it is cheesy one-liners. The scene in question involves Officer Riggs and a loaded pump-action. As Riggs attempts to question a woman on the street, a speeding car screeches by, window ajar and shotgun pointed out to kill. In short, Riggs gets shot. In the real world, Riggs would unsurprisingly fall over and land on his back, but that’s no fun. In the film, Riggs is blasted off his feet, launched into the air and sent hurdling through a conveniently nearby glass storefront. The whole sequence looks fantastic on-screen, combined with slow-motion, amplified sounds effects and music, the scene spews with that perfect Hollywood drama. However, when you think about it, the whole thing makes no sense.

To start, you have to know how a shotgun works. Your typical ballistic weapon, i.e. handgun or rifle, fires a single projectile and, depending on the range, will hit whatever the barrel points to. A shotgun, while capable of doing the same if loaded with the right type of ammunition, is always depicted in films to fire buckshot, birdshot; ammunition that spreads. This is because instead of firing one projectile, a shotgun can fire several small projectiles at once, typically a clump of small beads. As a result, a shotgun’s range can be limited. The further the clump of beads flies, the more it spreads. Each individual bead isn’t much of a threat on its own, the stopping power of a shotgun relies on the collective force of the multiple projectiles. The less grouped these projectiles are, the less effect the weapon will have. To Lethal Weapon’s benefit, the range of the shotgun’s discharge is plausible, though the car was far enough for the beads to begin spreading, it was still close enough to make an impactful blast. However, understand that the guns is still firing little beads. There is no reason a grouping of little metal beads should be able to lift a fully grown adult male off his feet and carry him through a glass pane. Ultimately, the issues with this scene can be broken down into major flaws:

·       First, the source of the projectiles would need to generate an enormously equal amount of force in order to execute the ridiculous result. This means that whoever fired the weapon would need to fly away the same way Riggs did.

·       Secondly, if the beads carried that much force, they wouldn’t stop at Riggs, they would go right through him and into the store on their own.

This over-dramatization of shotgun attacks looked way too good to stay confined to Lethal Weapon. Of course, those who watched this film took inspiration from this scene and replicated it in later media. These two physics flaws can be seen in two pieces of media that came out after Lethal Weapon and show the ripple effect this film’s influence had on future works. I will be looking at Cowboy Bebop and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.

One of my favorite video games, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, takes the concept of Lethal Weapon’s body launching shotgun to another degree. The game’s plot is rather complex, so I’ll keep it short: the game is set during the Cold War, you play as Snake, an American agent sent into the Russian jungles of Tselinoyarsk to assassinate his former mentor, now Russian defector, The Boss. Snake Eater is primarily a stealth game, it encourages you to do things quietly, for the most part. As the game progresses, you acquire bigger and better weapons. Towards the end of the game, the silenced tranquilizer pistol and combat knife you started out with are trampled over by an assortment of automatic firearms, rocket launchers, grenades and my favorite; the M37 pump-action shotgun. To put MGS 3’s shotgun into words, imagine a gun that only functions to replicate that scene from Lethal Weapon; it’s the best.

The shotgun is one of my favorite aspects of the game, it’s effects are hilarious and it’s incredibly satisfying to use. However, just looking at it in action, its clear to see how it defies the laws of physics. The shotgun has the incredible ability to launch people into the air, without any sort of effect on the user. It seems that somewhere in the process of Snake Eater’s development, the animators forgot to implement the forced of recoil onto shotgun-toting Snake. The shotgun has zero effect on the player when its used, you could be running and gunning and Snake won’t slow down a hair. In reality, if Snake were to fire this magical firearm, he would be launched back as far as his targets. The shotgun would need to create enough force within itself to fire a projectile that’s capable of carrying a hundred plus pound target off of the ground and a distance of several feet. Firing this fictional weapon would surely harm the user, it would have an effect akin to that of the Noisy Cricket from Men in Black.

The second great flaw of Lethal Weapon’s drive-by scene is that the projectiles are stopped entirely by Riggs’ mass. Another piece of media to fall victim to this trope is the popular anime Cowboy Bebop, a series that follows a group of space bounty hunters as they succeed and fail to hunt down bounties in order to pay for basic necessities such as food and fuel for their ships. The series thrives off its rich universe, deeply developed characters and creative narrative sequences both whimsical and serious in tone. The scene in question occurs at the beginning of the sixth episode, Sympathy for the Devil. A man confronts an old friend in a hotel room. The man is positioned on one side of the room, in front of a set of windows, his friend is positioned on the other side of the room. The man is shot with a handgun and sent flying off his feet, into the air and right through the windows he stands in front of. Of course.

Bullet penetration is a very common occurrence in the real world. The human body isn’t dense enough to stop most caliber bullets fired at an optimal range. Bullets in movies seem to act more like poison than ballistic projectiles. It seems that the very act of the bullet touching a person means instantaneous death. In the real world, a bullet is a shaped piece of metal flying at a high velocity, it’s lethal when it pierces the right place. In this scene from Cowboy Bebop, a single bullet, not even a collective of projectiles, a little metal bit lifts a full-grown man out of a hotel room via window. Though its cinematically pleasing, there is no way this would happen in the real world. The bullet would enter the man, exit rapidly out of the other side and probably shatter the window on its own. I doubt the man would even fall over after that. Accounting for adrenaline and depending where the bullet hit, the man would still have a fighting chance.

In Lethal Weapon’s case, the bullets don’t make it through Riggs’ body either. On the surface, the movie actually has a plausible reason for this, he was wearing a bullet-proof vest. The armor could surely stop the buckshot from entering Riggs’ chest. However, we can’t forget the context of the entire scene, the magic beads had the force to lift Riggs across the sidewalk; in the real world there wouldn’t be a vest strong enough (particularly during the time-period the film takes place) to stop that kind of blast. Riggs would look like an unfortunate cartoon character with a massive hole bore through his torso.

In conclusion, old-school Hollywood still affects modern media; of course it does, its what current content creators grew up watching. While I’m sure Lethal Weapon wasn’t the first movie to employ such a ridiculous display of bullet physics, it’s a popular and influential example; it’s also one that resonates with me personally. The issues I’ve talked about in this paper aren’t fatal flaws to the works I’ve described, at best they’re nitpicks that would only bother the particularly picky viewer. If you haven’t seen the mentioned works, Lethal Weapon, Cowboy Bebop or haven’t played the game Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, I highly recommend them as they are all excellent works of art.