I have thought about this and wanted to ask this question here for a long time, but what pushed me over the edge was, I was just watching Bad Lieutenant with the great Harvey Keitel. There is a scene where he fires what looks like a .357 magnum revolver, at the wall, to scare a hoodlum he is interrogating, inside a tiny convenience store with three or four other people standing around. Aside from the hoodlum jumping back in surprise, there is barely any reaction to this gunshot, and then everyone goes on talking as usual.
This is absolutely preposterous. If someone fired a large caliber handgun indoors, everyone’s ears would be ringing like hell, and totally stunned by the loudness of it. They would be visibly wincing in pain.
Guns are LOUD!
Let me repeat it: LOUD!
I have never seen a movie that accurately represented what a gunshot is like. Movies and videogames make it seem like gunfire is on the level of firecrackers - cheap, small firecrackers - going off. Baloney. Unless you are shooting a .22, the sound of a gunshot is louder than any similarly-sudden noise the average person is ever likely to hear.
Movie characters are constantly blasting away indoors with no hearing protection of any kind, using magnum handguns and AK-47s and the like, and nobody ever seems to be bothered by the noise, and they all go on communicating with each other without any problems at all. To this day, I have not ever seen a movie scene that realistically showed peoples’ reaction to gunshots.
Don’t even start with the “Dude, it’s a movie…it’s not supposed to be realistic.” Bullshit. It is supposed to be realistic, or the characters would be shooting toy guns with orange caps over the muzzles. It’s blatantly obvious that the people who make movies do strive for realism most of the time, so why haven’t any movies really done this?
I believe it would get in the way of the story telling in an action movie - unless you made a big point of it somehow. There’s just certain things movies do - how many times have you seen someone at the dinner table actually put food in their mouths? How often do people pay cab drivers? It’s little things that, if done correctly, would actually take you out of the story you’re being told. Can you imagine John McClane wincing or actually experiencing recoil? I think not.
In the first episode of The Walking Dead our protagonist crawls into an army tank and ends up shooting a zombie point blank in the head. I was surprised when the protagonist winced in pain from firing his revolver in such a confined space.
Edit: OH yeah, The Fugitive starring Tommy Lee Jones and Harrison Ford. Lee ends up shooting a suspect holding one of his men hostage right in the head. The hostage experienced pain and temporarily reduction in hearing from having a firearm discharged so close to his head.
Not every movie involving guns is a smash-bang-boom Brucevesternold Willtzeneggalone explosion-fest. There are dramas and subdued thrillers and even comedies that make use of gunplay and they also totally neglect the immense volume of gunshots.
I know what you mean. I have hunted since I was a teen and used to spot targets at the rifle range while in high school.
When my eldest son turned 16 we were on holidays in Queensland and I was able to take him to an indoor range to shoot a variety of handguns. They varied from .22 up to a Ruger Redhawk in .44 Magnum.
I was dumbstruck by the noise and blast, particularly with the revolvers. It made rifle shooting seem like using a cap gun.
Its also failry well portrayed in a scene in Black Hawk Down, when one of the soldiers fires his light machinegun very close to the ear of another soldier. The second soldier is deaf for the rest of the movie, which is referenced a couple of times later on.
So some movies do this right - at least some of the time.
But overall I agree with the OP, it would be interesting to see this more accurately portrayed in more movies.
I’ve complained about this repeatedly on this Board over the years. People on TV and in movies are always firing guns indoors, without any of the effects you’d expect. People say that it would get in the way of the narrative, but it seems to me that people have gotten so misinformed, so used to the way it’s normally handled that a real, skull-shattering gun noise would be a properly interesting and dramatic thing in its own right.
There’s a famous scene in The Sopranos that I think is pretty accurate.
Silvio is at dinner and someone he is with is shot point blank. He loses his hearing and becomes disoriented before he even knows that a gun has been fired near his head.
The only movie I’ve seen that acknowledged how loud gunshots are is either National Lampoon’s Family Vacation or National Lampoon’s European Vacation, believe it or not (can’t remember which one now). Chevy Chase fires a rifle near his children, and in the next scene the children are still deaf from the blast.
I thought they were done fairly well in Heat and Unforgiven.
I the canyons of Unforgive you could hear the gunshots echo and crackle their way across the valley. Similarly in Heat when they were shooting in the city streets their was immensely loud echos bouncing off all the surrounding buildings.
The really bad “Miami Vice” movie had that. There are several gunfights where every shot will wreck you ears as a spectator. The problem being that it takes a lot of the pleasure of watching an action scene.