I’m putting together a screenplay for a Kung-Fu movie and so I want to keep the action as realistic as possible. But I’m stuck on one part. The hero of the story has jedi-like reflexes and usually has no problem dodging bullets (given they’re not fired from point blank range!)
But dodging bullets requires moving a good sized piece of flesh (one’s body) a short distance very rapidly which would require tremendous energy. And I’m thinking it might be more efficient if our hero instead strikes the bullets with his hands and deflects them away–maybe into the chest of an enemy standing behind him and off to the side!
Given eyesight that can spot and track a bullet, and reflexes that can deliver a hand to strike the bullet perpendicular to its path, would it be possible for a human hand to deflect a bullet, or at least swat it into the ground, without sustaining a penetrating wound?
No, the bullet would go right through your hand. In fact, if you’re swating at it, you’re just increasing its velocity relative to your extremities. You’d do less damage to yourself by standing still.
I think a human hand could deflect a bullet slightly, but not significantly or swat it to the ground. The hero would also get one heck of a friction burn. A more realistic scenario is for the hero to grab a frying pan or some such and use it as a shield to deflect the bullet or redirect it into the ground.
You’re already giving the guy superhuman vision and reflexes. Within the universe of your screenplay, you may as well make it possible for him to deflect bullets.
Not unless the speed of your hand could match the speed of the bullet. Think of it like this. You are on a plane travelling at 600 mph. The cup in front of you is also travelling 600 mph. You are able to reach out and grab it because you are both travelling at the same speed. If your hand could move at 1000 feet per second (a rough estimate of a bullet speed. This can vary significantly!), then you could snatch the bullet out of the air.
Short answer, no. The human body is not capable of moving anywhere near that fast.
Given that he’s hitting the bullet at arm’s length, it seems to me he’d need to be able to slap the bullet at bulletlike velocities, otherwise it just wouldn’t move aside fast enough. That’s more than just fast reflexes, that’s speed and toughness far above human. Plus, it has other implications; if he can do that, he can throw things at bullet velocity as well, and probably wouldn’t find letting the bullets hit him lethal.
Predicting where the bullet is going, Jedi-style and using a frying pan ( or whatever; a sword ? More dramatic. ) as suggested would work, without the need for such superhuman toughness. Or, predicting the bullet path and deflecting it from hitting someone else wouldn’t require bullet velocities, as you could have longer than arm’s length for the vector change to take effect.
I don’t know that this is necessarily true. I can imagine someone with no special abilities but a lot of luck dodging a bullet.
A target is running and the shooter is tracking with a handgun, say. The shooter pulls the trigger and the target stops. The gun goes off, but the bullet misses because the shooter is still leading the target. The shooter reaims at the now stationary target. But, as the gun goes off, the target jumps one foot to the right. No tremendous achievement, but enough to dodge the bullet. (Maybe better to say, dodge the shooter.)
A person with Jedi-like reflexes should be able to-- suspension of disbelief, suspension of disbelief-- dodge bullets without needing to move in a super human way.
Many years ago I was assisting in the ER and I went over to see a guy who was looking through his hand. Through where the knuckle used to be. He wasn’t as distressed about this as I expected. They were prepping him for surgery and they were going to go up and fix the bullet hole through his hand soon.
The thing that was worrying them was the bullet hole in his forehead. Yep, forehead. This was when CT scanners were new and they hadn’t had a chance to get him into the front of the long line to use it yet (we were at LA County Hospital, a St. Elsewhere’s if there ever was one).
It turned out the bullet that hit him in the forehead had passed through his hand first. The reason it only plowed a 1/4" deep hole tangentially into his frontal bone was his knuckle slowed it down so much. X-rays showed no bullet, so our best guess was it smacked through his hand, hit his forehead, made a tangential trough, and fell back out.
And no, his hand wasn’t on his forehead when the bullet hit them both. Out in the air in front of his forehead.
So no. No catchee bullet. Bullet goes through hand.
Of course, it’s imaginary, so do whatever you please. You could have him unable to catch a bullet that is fired at him directly, but swat it aside with a frying pan; then he could slam a door or hold up a book or something, and the bullet goes through wood or book and slows down enough that he can catch it. Sorta the way the guy’s forehead caught the bullet that had been slowed down by punching through the bones of his hand. It could leave a little burned spot in his palm - or a dab of blood from one of those charming non-wound wounds people in entertainment suffer.
Suppose one made a karate chop motion perpendicular to the path of the bullet. Time it so that the edge of the hand makes contact with the side of the bullet just past the nose. As he continues his chop he pushes on the rear of the bullet more than he did the front, causing a slight deflection in the opposite direction of the chop. I have no idea just what deflection angle that would cause but it would not be zero.
I think a certain amount of exaggeration is permissable in these films.
In particular, I loved the atmosphere of ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’.
Martial artists chasing each other up walls and through treetops - my ‘suspension of disbelief’ was easy watching this one.
In the movies, anything is possible. But if you characters are meant to be normal humans, this doesn’t seem plausible. Superheroes, sure. But not mere mortals.
IANAP but wouldn’t part of the problem be that your hand would have to accelerate to the speed of the bullet, say the aforementioned 1000 feet per second, in order not to encounter a penetrating injurt and then decelerate back to zero… all within an arm’s length?
Wouldn’t that put a rather unsustainable amount of stress on one’s joints, tendons, muscle, etc?
Mm. Just had a though. What if you gave them some sort of metal/kevlar/ceramic gloves? If they’ve got the relfexes to get their hand next to the bullet, a tough enough gloves could lend enough plausiblity to the swatting/deflecting motion.
One way the “reflex” explanation makes sense is if the hero is watching the shooter, and can spot the trigger finger starting to move. That way, they’re matching reflexes with another human, and not the speed of the bullet itself, if that makes sense. It also gives your hero some vulnerability, since there’s not much they can do about someone shooting from behind or from concealment.
As for deflecting a bullet with your hand–not a chance, even given superhuman reflexes. It’s a question of applying an impulse normal to the travel axis of the bullet in the short period of time that it passes by your hand. If we’re figuring that your hand is 4 inches wide and the bullet is moving 800fps (the low end of speed for a large bore round) then you have a 0.0004 second window of time to make contact with the bullet and apply a force (never mind what kind of damage a moving bullet would do to your hand). Plus, because you’d be applying a torque to the spinning bullet, you’d probably cause it to tumber off into a quasirandom direction. IIRC the Remo Williams/The Destroyer series took care of this by attributing Williams’ bullet dodging talents to his ability to hear the tendons in the hand snap when pulling the trigger and dodging out of the path of the bullet before it was fired. (Of course, Remo could also instantly sober himself up by breathing deeply and thinking his liver into rapidly purifying his blood, which extends into Stranger In A Strange Land territory.)
Seriously, realisitic action in a chop-socky flick? What are you trying to do, ruin it for everyone? The last thing anybody wants to see Jet Li do is go wrestling around on the floor trying to bite some guy’s nose off.
The original Flash (Jay Garrick) was doing this way back in his first appearance - matching speed with the bullet, grabbing it, then slowing down. I used to wonder how, even if he could accelerate his own body to match the bullet’s speed, he could decelerate back to a standstill with the bullet in his hand and not have it punch through his fingers. Similarly, even if you could easily match speed running beside a slowly-rolling railroad car, you can’t necessarily grab on and bring it to a stop in any reasonably short amount of time.
So it looks like some of y’all are grokin’ my premise. Just to explain, no, is too much, let me sum up:
I’m NOT talking about snatching the bullet or in some other wise capturing or directly impeding its vector.
I AM talking about manually applying a force on the bullet that is directed approximately perpendicular to its vector. I would expect things like the momentum of the projectile and its spin to be affected by the momentum of the hand and the angle of the blow. I also anticipate some kind of grazing burn. So I guess my question could be rephrased as: How hard would you have to karate-chop a 125 grain 9mm jacketed hollowpoint round travelling at 1200 fps in order to alter its vector by 45 degrees? And could the average human deliver such a blow, assuming it could be timed right?
And let’s just forget about whether or not the shooter is travelling backwards on a treadmill at 1200 feet per second when he fires.
