It’s interesting and most likely not applicable - for the very same reasons you cant get realistic sword fighting (or even street fighting) in most Hollywood movies: realistic fighting doesn’t look as exciting as the fake thing.
Glad the author sees into that very clearly.
* Could be an interesting art game tho as someone pointed out below
When creating an entertainment product, be it a movie or game, your user’s expectations are the canvas you paint on. In some places you deliberately violate them, in others you accommodate them at the expense of “realism.”
An amusing example: In the Sly Stallone rock climbing action movie “Cliffhanger,” they shot a scene where he ice climbs without an axe. To get past a certain section, he dips his gloved hand in cold water and freezes it to the ice, using that for traction.
This is an actual technique alpinists have used. But test audiences (who are not alpine climbers) rejected it as preposterous. So it’s on the DVD as a “deleted scene,” but wasn’t in the cut they released to theatres.
The movie also features a “bolt gun” he carries that can sink a bolt into rock, which can then be used as a hold or to attach a carabiner. No such thing is possible with current technology, but audiences accepted it as possible, so it plays a prominent role in the plot.
The movie’s producers were catering to their audience’s expectation as they actually were, not as we may wish they were.
This is very evident in historical media where medieval people are portrayed as wearing burlap sacks and misshapen clumps of fur inside plain brown plaster castles rather than wearing brocade, silks, or brightly died wool inside colorfully-painted palaces or churches. To some extent you have to meet the audience where they are.
The European world-view on what constitutes fine aesthetic sense is derived from Renaissance mis-interpretation of Greek decoration as being white marble. The colours that our culture subsequently rejects as gaudy, tasteless, and are othered are based on this.
In reality it turns out that the Greeks painted everything batshit colours and Ancient Athens probably looked more like an 80s day-glo MTV video.
Imagine the products of a culture with less tolerance for untruth than our own. It might see more films with postscript reality checks, like Jackie Chan's making-of "if you do this, you will get hurt". More children's picture books with errata pages, like Penny Chisholm's. I wonder if some such might be encouraged somehow?
"Want" or "is good" are two different things. We're living in a culture where a lot of people clearly love believing all sorts of untruths, and don't care much for the real truth. Is that good? I think not.
Of course movies are for the most part relatively harmless entertainment, but they too do shape expectations. I've heard of Juries rejecting reasonable evidence because crime shows have taught them to expect iron clad proof.
You can not watch the movies you know. Nobody forced you to.
Movies are just fairy tales and people enjoy fairy tales for good reason. Stories are actually a very efficient way to sharing information. I could why in detail but I’d just say it’s the way we process information is more emotional than logical. A fairy tale is essentially a hyper compressed emotional truth (when it is a GOOD fairy tale).
If you watch MMA you would know that this fight would be over around the 1 minute mark.
The impression of realism you get here is not real realism - just a way to simulate it, still holding onto the tropes of the genre and the “time dilation” necessary for suspense in filmmaking.
Real street fights don’t last long, and fights between trained fighters are even shorter. one sucker punch or one good chokehold is all it takes.
> Medieval villagers were often living on the edge of subsistence. Agricultural surpluses were skimmed by the church and the feudal lords. Bad harvests, banditry, warfare and disease might decimate a village community at any time.
Dwarf Fortress has shown that this would in fact be quite exciting, but it would probably be a lot more niche.
Once you get over the bonkers UI its pretty easy to make a dwarf fortress that can survive essentially forever, farmers are ridiculously productive so you can support a population of 100-200 pretty easily with 10 or fewer farmers.
Dwarf Fortress also proving that if you hit the correct niche that your game can get a huge following if you're scratching an itch people never knew they had.
Sword fights certainly could seem more realistic without losing the excitement. Check this out ('fighting' starts at around 2 minutes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GoQlvc_H3s
This is great but virtually all of this is similar to what I know about the samurai - most fighting with a sword ends VERY quickly with someone getting stabbed. We are talking about an encounter between two men being decided in a few swordstrokes. Seconds, not minutes. There is not much room for 3-5-10 minute fights and acrobatics.
Yes it’s interesting as a YouTube video, but for filmmaking suspense comes from “dilating” the moment in time, spending as much as possible in each step before the final blow.
With realistic sword fighting, this is mostly impossible afaik.
> most fighting with a sword ends VERY quickly with someone getting stabbed.
Tanner Greer recently posted about teaching the Iliad to high schoolers, and made this point explicitly. The Iliad is composed for an audience that is familiar with hand-to-hand combat, and depicts it exactly this way: two people close, and one of them kills the other one and moves on. Fighting is mostly done with spears, not swords, but it happens the same way.
Homeric depictions of combat impressed my mother in a different way (she is a doctor): "Wow! Homer really knew his human anatomy!"
Ridley Scott's debut movie, "The Duelists" is such a movie. It's based on real diaries of two dudes who dueled several times over course of decades. The sword fighting in the movie is among the most realistic. Check out the opening scene:
Also, the sword fight from "The Deluge" (Polish title - "Potop"). Admittedly, the plot says the commander didn't want to kill a rebelling but skilled officer, just teach him a lesson. But otherwise well done. It was a time when fencing and horse riding training was mandatory for Polish actors.
One movie that struck me as having probably more realistic gun fights than most (though I wouldn't know, having fortunately no experience with gun fights) is Children of Man. People are doing something. Suddenly someone collapses, you hear gun shots, they look for cover, and still you have no idea where the gun shots are coming from. Much more exciting and terrifying than the usual Hollywood gun fight.
Glad the author sees into that very clearly.
* Could be an interesting art game tho as someone pointed out below