Guns in movies. Interesting article

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De Plano

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Jun 28, 2012
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http://www.cracked.com/personal-exp...tors-to-shoot-guns-and-hopefully-not-die.html

Figured some of you would be interested in this. I learned a bit, but I am not a "gun guy".

I did not need to be told someone firing a Desert Eagle sideways was not smart, now I know why it is dumber than I thought.

If this is the wrong place for this article to be posted, go ahead and move it. I would rather have it moved than have a mod think "wrong forum, dummy" every time they see it
 
Ha! That was interesting but pretty much known with gun people I think. Yes it is absolutely dangerous to fire blanks in close range situations as you still have a lot of pressure and blast coming out of the barrel of the firearm. Bruce Lee anyone?

And yeah, some movies get things right.... Some movies get things crazy wrong. Like someone firing a 5/6 shot revolver 10 times before reloading... if they even reload at all! Another common thing to see is actors not portraying the recoil that happens when you shoot. The Walking Dead show is infamous for this. Many times you can see the characters shooting handguns or rifles that look like they have absolutely no recoil at all. This is probably due to the fact that all the sounds and flashes are added in with CGI/editing and such.

It mentions John Wick which is a sweet gun porn movie. Sure it's crazy as hell - but the cool thing is that Keanu actually did a lot of real firearms training with Taran Tactical to prepare for the film. There are videos on YouTube of him running a mean 3 gun course and doing pretty well. It's got a lot of cool tactics and combat scenes that look really "hardcore operator" like. It's fun.

At the end of the day though you always just have to remember it's all just entertainment... all just acting. Though I very much do appreciate when films or shows get things "right" with firearms, being a shooter myself. When they do you just know they had some good experts on set telling them how things should look and what not. It's obvious when some film/shows just don't care about any of that as well.
 
I kinda die a bit inside when I see a scene in film or TV with a blatant flaw or a danger/dumb move.

Example would the the Taken TV series. I says to my self "self let's give this a watch", I'll try the pilot and one episode. Then as we're nicely going along the dude with an EOTech on his rifle aims his weapon and we cut to his POV; bang he has some kind of sniper crosshair telescopic view. Hard pass on that series.
 
A thing to keep in mind is that truth is often boring, and makes for bad story telling. So yeah, we see the end result through the lens of all our knowledge, but to the film maker they are just doing everything they can to keep the thing from sucking. So when a costumer or armorer puts a certain scope on a rifle for a certain external look, and three months later the editor and CG team go in to do the POV, its not like they are going to be wedded to that little detail. They need to tell a story, so they do stuff to make it work out. If the story is good enough, then the technical details could all be wrong and it wouldn't matter a bit.

Not to say that your complaints are invalid, everyone watches their choice media their way, I'm not telling you that you are doing it wrong. But its sort of like when someone critiques a knife for being bad at something that it was never designed to do.
 
The best gun guy director has been John Milius .Great movies with great , unusual guns . Such as a Spencer repeater along with a box of loaded tubes . With the largest box it would mean about 80 rounds , really a potent force in those days !! :D
 
One of my favorite gun scenes in movies has to be the street shootout in Heat after the bank robbery. Obviously a lot of people would list that one as well. But the thing that really got me with that aside from the gritty-ness and raw feeling of it was the SOUND. The rifles were actually LOUD. Not like some movies where they sound like paintball guns. They really did good with that - the sound of 5.56 and .308 rounds being fired together would be seriously loud - I'm glad they knew to boost the volume of them in that.
 
Its not just that, normally in a scene like that the foley is done separately, so the blanks don't have to be as load, making them less dangerous to the hearing of the actors. But it means you can't get the echos which we instinctively understand and use as an aid. In Heat, they used loud blanks and recorded the sound on set (much harder to get right live, which is why they don't do it as much) and that gets the echo and clatter that makes the sound unique. As a shooting scene its amazing, as a technical accomplishment, its near legendary.
 
I love how so many silencers (especially on relatively large caliber guns) muffle the sound to a whisper. Like I said I don't know much, but I KNOW that is wrong. Some movies where they have borderline sci-fi gadgets (Bond) I can give a pass to but not most movies
 
gadgetgeek said:
A thing to keep in mind is that truth is often boring, and makes for bad story telling. So yeah, we see the end result through the lens of all our knowledge, but to the film maker they are just doing everything they can to keep the thing from sucking. So when a costumer or armorer puts a certain scope on a rifle for a certain external look, and three months later the editor and CG team go in to do the POV, its not like they are going to be wedded to that little detail. They need to tell a story, so they do stuff to make it work out. If the story is good enough, then the technical details could all be wrong and it wouldn't matter a bit.

Not to say that your complaints are invalid, everyone watches their choice media their way, I'm not telling you that you are doing it wrong. But its sort of like when someone critiques a knife for being bad at something that it was never designed to do.
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I know what you're saying about continuity. When X-files and Millennium was filming in Vancouver I always enjoyed watching how they would sew together a scene of someone running down streets and alleys and knowing that that person would have had to hop five miles in reality, not just turn a corner.

My opinion about firearms in entertainment is that if they want to use them as plot pieces then they have to be respectful of reality. It costs nothing more to be right. And I've found that one lazy plot device will need to many more. I'm cautiously optimistic about the new crop of military entertainment and as always I'll give a try.
 
Cracked.com is a great source of weirdly awesome articles. Probably my second most visited website(after Bladeforums of course), haha.
 
It will come, I mean, you look at the noise from the first fast and furious movie compared to the latest one where they are really trying to mimic the notes of each car, where early on they are all just turbo 4 cylinders. Its a constant level of improvement, since the bar to entry has gotten lower, the better the indie guys do, the harder the big time guys have to work to keep their position. Even in Sci-fi, they can't just throw in a cool sounding word without someone calling them out on it, its gotta really match with at least mostly plausible science.
 
De Plano said:
http://www.cracked.com/personal-exp...tors-to-shoot-guns-and-hopefully-not-die.html

Figured some of you would be interested in this. I learned a bit, but I am not a "gun guy".

I did not need to be told someone firing a Desert Eagle sideways was not smart, now I know why it is dumber than I thought.

If this is the wrong place for this article to be posted, go ahead and move it. I would rather have it moved than have a mod think "wrong forum, dummy" every time they see it
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I'm a non-gun guy that owns guns :eek:

I found the article interesting to a point but in the end the guns in movies are a means not an end so realism in a shot really isn't all that important. I just finished catching up on Person of Interest last week and pretty much every gun scene in that movie is unrealistic but it doesn't detract from the story in any way IMHO.
 
GermanyChris said:
I'm a non-gun guy that owns guns :eek:

I found the article interesting to a point but in the end the guns in movies are a means not an end so realism in a shot really isn't all that important. I just finished catching up on Person of Interest last week and pretty much every gun scene in that movie is unrealistic but it doesn't detract from the story in any way IMHO.
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I shoot everybody in the legs. It's kinda my thing.
 
I always wondered how the movies get away with felons handling firearms. Mark Wahlberg is a convicted felon. As such he is not supposed to even be in proximity of a firearm.
 
Mongo said:
AND.... Mark fricken Walberg is ANTI-gun. Pretty hypocritical to be making movies where he glorifies gun usage. Bastard.
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Yeah, along with a whole lot of other hollywood shills.

Thankfully there are some cool level headed guys out there. That one video interview clip of Kurt Russel where he schools some dumbass on the 2nd Amendment is great. If you haven't seen it I can find the link or you can search youtube.
 
I can't remember if it was a Steven Segal or Michael Kai White film, but I had a laugh when his gun kept changing from a Beretta (Sig? can't remember) to a Glock and back every time he moved past a different stack of pallets.
 
De Plano said:
I love how so many silencers (especially on relatively large caliber guns) muffle the sound to a whisper. Like I said I don't know much, but I KNOW that is wrong. Some movies where they have borderline sci-fi gadgets (Bond) I can give a pass to but not most movies
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Good point and a peeve of mine. Because people believe this stuff as fact. Hence the resistance to taking silencers off the NFR list. Silencers wouldn't really have helped the guy in Los Vegas. Perhaps he might have fired a few more rounds.... but that is conjecture. The distance is what caused people to comment it sounded like fire crackers going off.
 
Mongo said:
AND.... Mark fricken Walberg is ANTI-gun. Pretty hypocritical to be making movies where he glorifies gun usage. Bastard.
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Especially when Mark fricken Walberg is a convicted felon that served time for assaulting and beating an asian man so bad he was blinded in one eye. The attack was racially motivated and Walberg has some anger issues.
 
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