I think The Unforgiven deserves mention, not that it’s necessarily ultra-realistic, but because it sets out to point up the unrealism of much of the genre.
My vote goes to the Fred Zinneman original version of Day of the Jackal. You get to see the Jackal’s meticuliys prep for his kill, and the scenes at the climax seem very realistic and convincing, unlike the multiply-filmed and drawn-out scenes usually shown. My only reservations:
1.) The movie shows the first explosive bullet (which misses) exploding on the tarmac*, rather than “harmlessly within the softened tarmac” as the book has it. I think it’d be hard for the security sevices, who are, after all, on the alert for such an attempt, to miss this. But you have to allow for the necessarily exaggeration of film to clue the audience in to what happened.
2.) After our recent discussions of silencers, the Jackal’s silencer seems appropriate, but I still have to wonder.
3.) The Jackal gets thrown well up against the wall, as if lifted there, by the spray of machine gun bullets. Is that realistic? Or is it (more likely) more movie exaggeration?
*Presumably by the credited effects man Wally Veevers, the third “forgotten man” of effects for 2001. Not to mention the original Day of the Triffids, and the mysterious “Dentist on the Job” that forms the “false start” on the current DVD release of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”.
I’d have to go with The Beast, Kevin Reynold’s story of a Soviet tank crew separated from it’s group in Afghanistan. From the first scene where it’s firing on a village I was awestruck by the realism and am pretty sure when you slowly run over someone with a tank, that’s exactly what they’d look like afterwards. Like others, it deals with how men probably react in war to situations far too brutal for any training to have adequately prepared them for. One helluva show with good performances by George Dzundza and Jason Patric.
I’d have to go with Predator. While the final fight scene isn’t very believable (Arnold should have been comatose by then, but the predator left itself wide open several times) the rest of the movie was spot-on! Having fought alien trophy hunters in the jungles of Guatemala during my time with the FCC, I appreciated the degree of realism in that movie.
Or the gunfights in Heat
I was trying to think of car chases that were shot in real time (no sped up film a la Mad Max II) like The Robbery and Bullitt and then I realised that in those films there were obviously professional drivers behind the steering wheels.
Are there any films where drivers are shown flailing around haphazardly in rubbish hatch backs whose brakes boil and tyres shred, outside of an episode of Cops?
Any movies that you can reccomend with more realistic sword-fighting would be most welcome.
Pushkin, if you want car realism, try The French Connection. It was filmed without closing off the streets and those near misses (and do I remember that it included some of the collisions too?) were real.
I liked this one too. The way the fight starts, with what is essentially a cold-blooded murder, looked pretty real to me. And I thought it was a nice touch that Duvall and Gambon waste a few shots missing each other at 10 feet before Duvall finally gets him. It looked like two older guys out of their element in a gunfight.
For all the reasons previously mentioned and more, Crimson Tide is hideously unrealistic, operationally and otherwise. The Hunt For Red October wasn’t much better. (Seriously, how did an Alfa submarine with its noisy sodium-cooled power plant get anywhere near Red October without the nearby 688-type hearing it? And the XO of Dallas purposely swimming in front of a torpedo and then performing an emergency ascent? That guy would have been in the brig faster than Ronald Reagan could say, “Evil Empire”. The book, although taking certain dramatic liberties, is significantly better.)
Bourne was reasonably believable (at least insofar as the action scenes) until the final confrontation. The fall down four flights of stairs (and that absurd center of forehead shot he takes during falling) were completely over-the-top; cushioning body or no, he wouldn’t have just sprained an ankle, he’d have a couple broken legs if not a fractured pelvis. There were a few other absurdities as well, like 7mm of neoprene wetsuit causing bullets to stop just below the skin’s surface, the exploding gas tank, and “Rome” smashing in through the window. (Why doesn’t he just wait outside an snipe Bourne through a window or when he walks out of the building.) It’s all pretty standard action movie fare, though the car chase was well done, even if the driving against traffic sequence was implausible. But ever since The French Connection, everyone has been trying to up the ante on car chases. (One thing I did like about the first movie was the scene where Bourne is preparing Marie for some kind of diversion in the hotel lobby so he could assault the front desk and get information on “John Michael Kane”, and then she walks out to his confusion, having “just asked for it.” It totally sets the viewer up for some big dumb action sequence and then does something very smart instead.)
Talking of The French Connection (which I don’t think is properly an ‘action’ movie, but there are gunfights and car chases), this one is so realistic that much of the filming was done without permits, including a good portion of the infamous car chase sequence being done on open roads. This is what I would expect a real car chase to be like. This is probably the most realistic police procedural I can think of.
Ronin isn’t really anything like realistic in plot (although the Mamet-penned twists and dialogue are brilliant) but Frankenheimer doesn’t shy away from showing bystanders being hurt or killed by stray gunfire and moving vehicles. It also has some great car chase correography, though again, pushing the boundaries of plausibility.
No one has yet mentioned Unforgiven. [on preview: ah, I see someone finally did.] I think this is a pretty realistic depiction of an actual shootout, with everyone so afraid of being hit that they can barely aim. Of course, it gets a lot of mileage out of deconstructing the whole Western mythology and particularly “The Man With No Name”, which makes it seem more realistic yet. The whores are kind of plain, the characters get sick when they’re cold and wet, and the “hero” is a broken-down reformed sociopathic killer who just wants to get his kids out of the dead-end pig farm with dying livestock.
Just Three Kings. The valve isn’t a heart valve; its just a long needle that goes into the pleural cavity to evacuate air in order to prevent pneumothorax from air escaping from the lung. I don’t know if I’d call Three Kings realistic–much of it was highly stylized, and a satire of jigoistic war movies–but an excellent, underrated film.
Director Michael Mann had the main cast attend daily firearms training with Andy McNab for two months. The gun handling in that film is about the most realistic I’ve seen on film, but I think any cop that decided to engage in a confrontation with a heavily armed criminal gang in the middle of downtown Los Angeles at lunchtime would be evicerated by both the administration and the media.
It’s not an action movie, or indeed, even a movie, but Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is probably the most realistic depiction of actual espionage to be found on video. Only one shooting (well, a few more are implied, but offscreen at “Moscow Centre”), everybody is worrying about perogatives and internal politics in the grubby, cramped corridors of “The Circus”, the food is bad and the service is worse. The evil mastermind is a silent, chain-smoking spymaster who’s only seen in flashback. It’s remarkably close to the book, save for a bit of chronological reworking and a few minor dropped subplots of little consequence.
Stranger
Re: Crimson Tide.
There’s something I could never figure out about that movie. Here’s how I remember it: They show the crew practicing a launch drill, including coming to the right depth to launch their missiles. Then the real launch order comes, but they have to dive deep to avoid an enemy sub. As they’re doing that, they get the order that Denzel thinks is countermanding the launch, but they go too deep to receive the entire message. The captain says that as soon as it’s safe, they’ll launch; Denzel says they have to get the rest of that message, then all hell breaks loose. What’s the problem? If they’re going to launch, they have to come shallow to do it, and they’ll get the rest of the message anyway.
Even within the movie’s own reality, it didn’t add up.
Love story? In Midway? Wow. I’d completely blocked that out of my mind.
They didn’t just dive deep to evade the Akula - they wound up killing it, but taking a near miss from its torpedo, which among other things, broke the radio. Since this was the only radio on the entire boat capable of receiving launch orders (I guess the spare radio was left on the dock to make room for dog food), they couldn’t receive a message until some harried technician fixed the radio.
Didn’t the antenna break or something?
Charlie Heston’s son, Edward Albert, falls in love with the Japanese girl who’s family is being relocated in the internment camp.
As I remember it, they evade the Akula for a while as Hackman and Denzel are squabbling. Denzel convinces the Captain to deploy some sort of floating, tethered antenna. The mechanism for it malfunctions, and makes enough noise to give away their position. Then they fight it out, destroy the other sub, and their radio gets damaged. Now there’s no other sub to worry about, they’re free to launch, and Denzel has to take over (or at least delay things until the radio is fixed).
Until the radio gets broken, they’re fighting over nothing. And the whole deal with the antenna is pointless and almost gets them killed.
I think the squabbling then was Denzel requesting they stay in radio contact, in case the order does get countermanded (since hopefully the Russian Army will take out the rebels before they can launch), and Hackman reluctantly agreeing. They raise the antenna, start to get the recall message, the antenna jams, message stops in midtransmission, big fight with Akula, radio breaks, after which Hackman gets wants to launch but Denzel doesn’t concur because of the interrupted message.
That’s part of why Denzel’s position is kind of understandable - it’s not that they got a transmission that cut off for no reason - they know it cut off because the antenna broke.
I see from tvguide.com that it’s on this weekend, so I’ll record & watch it. I always enjoy watching Gene punch Denzel in the face at the end anyway.
In response to the last few posts about Crimson Tide, let me just say that ballistic missile submarines have multiple, redundant communication systems. For a sub to lose all ability to communicate and still be capable of launching is unlikely to the point of absurdity. Also, as I mentioned previously, there is no provision for countermanding launch orders, nor is there a provision for a sub to radio back, “Are you sure?” :rolleyes:
I thought K-19 was fairly realistic, except for the overblown concern about the boat’s reactor and/or missiles exploding. While the reactor could have had a meltdown, destroying the boat in the process and causing a huge mess, it’s physically impossible for a nuclear reactor to explode like a bomb. It is also all-but-impossible to cause the nuclear payload in a missile to explode by accident.
I thought Das Boot was very realistic. However, not having served aboard either a Russian sub or a German U-boat, I can’t say for sure about either of the latter two flicks.
I loved The Hunt for Red October when it came out, but it had lots of problems as well. I haven’t seen this in over 10 years, but some of the goofs that come to mind include:
[ul][li]30,000 ton Red October can make a sharp turn, but a 1-ton homing torpedo can’t? :rolleyes: (In the book, IIRC, the boat outran the torpedo before it ran out of fuel.)[/li][li]All of the vessels in the movie were much, much closer than actual engagement distances.[/li][li]Way too much neon, chrome, and pretty lights in the sets used. Actual subs are much more drab.[/li][li]Way too much color and pretty lights in the displays. Actual displays at the time were all monochrome.[/li][li]Air-launched torpedoes don’t have self-destruct mechanisms. Even if they did, how would the signal be transmitted to the torpedo?[/ul][/li]There were a great many more errors, but they tend to either be very technical or classified.
[QUOTE=robby]
[ul][li]30,000 ton Red October can make a sharp turn, but a 1-ton homing torpedo can’t? :rolleyes: (In the book, IIRC, the boat outran the torpedo before it ran out of fuel.)[/ul][/li][/quote]
One strategy for diverting an incoming torpedo is to do a quick turn in the water, creating a “knuckle” of turbulent water. The purpose isn’t to turn faster than the torpedo, which, as you note, is absurd, but to create a confusion in its target so that it loses track of the submarine which then heads off in a different direction.
[QUOTE=robby]
[ul][li]All of the vessels in the movie were much, much closer than actual engagement distances.[/ul][/li][/quote]
Yeah, but then the final scene between boats would have taken half an hour or more rather than ninety seconds. You can’t expect movie studio executives to sit still for that long. :dubious:
[QUOTE=robby]
[ul][li]Air-launched torpedoes don’t have self-destruct mechanisms. Even if they did, how would the signal be transmitted to the torpedo?[/ul][/li][/quote]
But then you wouldn’t have James Earl Jones pushing the destruct button telling the torpedoman, “You heard the torpedo hit that hull, and I was never here.”
Seriously, a torpedo being auto-detonated in open water (which is, as robby notes, impossible for an air-launched fish) isn’t going to sound anything like one hitting the hull. You’ll hear a bang, but no implosion, breaching, or breakup noises. There really wasn’t any point to the entire exercise, other than to artificially ramp up the tension.
IIRC, in the book, they actually took a decommisioned Polaris sub hull, towed it out to sea, and sunk it as a stand-in for Red October (including a couple of prize artifacts taken from the real Red October). Red October later encounters an Alfa submarine lying in wait along their probable route; rather than all of this funny business with the flying subs and dodging torpedos, she simply turns and plows over the Alfa, breaking it in two (and protected by her own double hull and battery plating). Frankly, I think this would have made for a much better scene in the film, but not as Top Gun-ish that the filmmakers were looking for. The book isn’t exactly a great work of American literature, but it is a competent and well-researched hack technothriller, and substantially better than Clancy’s later work.
Stranger
There’s a good reason for that:
Rorion Gracie of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu’s Gracie family was one of the fight scene coordinators. Not sure if that needed to be spoilered, but there you go. 
On the one hand, Steve McQueen did much of his own driving. On the other hand, he was a world-class, semi-professional driver who co-drove the second-place car at Sebing in 1970.
[aside] Did McQueen and Paul Newman ever race against each other?