Cutting Up Wolverine: On Choreography & Film Technique

I reluctantly went to see Wolverine with my girlfriend at the local theater in Fenway Friday night, but I walked out of the theater satisfied, quite contrary to my expectations. The move contained a solid storyline and, though many critics seem to disagree with the plot, I felt that the narrative fit the mood of an X-Men supplement. Many corny lines, lots of action, and a satisfying amount of cool mutant powers later, and I felt like I’d gotten my money’s worth plus an extra bit on the side.

The trailer to X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

However, I have one gripe about the film: its fight choreography.

Not to say that it’s bad, per se. But what got me pondering the action sequences while watching was this music video I had recently seen. Watch it below and pay specific attention to the film’s camera depth: the establishing shot, long shots, and medium shots.

The music video for Daft Punk’s “Around the World.”

Michel Gondry produced the music video for Daft Punk’s “Around the World,” released in 1997. A strange video, indeed, especially once you realize that all the characters represent one part of the music (be it bass line, vocals, etc.). In terms of capturing what’s going on in the video, though, the interesting thing to take away is the camera techniques that I mentioned before (establishing, long, and medium). Gondry expresses the purpose of these shots in an interview with RES magazine, in which he states, “This was my first try to do choreography and I was sick to see choreography being mistreated in videos like filler with fast cutting and fast editing, really shallow. I don’t think choreography should be shot in close-ups.” Let’s take away two things from Gondry’s comment. First, he suggests a certain aesthetic in choreography, which we must view from afar. Second, his statement insinuates that “fast cutting and fast editing” might create a new or different type of choreography.

The problem in Wolverine‘s choreography to which I alluded at the beginning of this article deals with the latter point and speaks to the former. Although most of the fights left a decent impression, most of the fights between Wolverine and his brother/rival Sabretooth felt artificial. I say this because those fight sequences relied heavily on the “fast cutting and fast editing” that Gondry fulminates against. Relying on these fast cuts, the scenes would flip around from many different angles (filmed by multiple cameras), capturing a punch, switching to the block, watching the kick, and then skipping to the reaction. All in all, it’s very childish editing (unless you don’t notice the cuts), because it seems as if no action is happening at all, and the scene was formed essentially by clips of “actions that resemble a fight” stitched together in a style of a student film that couldn’t afford stunt doubles. Unfortunately, because the movie was just recently released in theaters, I have no footage with which to make an example (and none of the other fight scenes from the X-Men movie series do Wolverine‘s fights justice, though I guess they would improve them).

Although we can’t watch these scenes right now (go see them in theaters; it’s worth your time anyway!), knowledge of Wolverine’s edited choreography gives us the opportunity to ruminate on how choreography works. In particular, I wonder if there’s a disparity between Western and Eastern takes on fight scene sequencing, choreography, or general approaches to and methodologies of film. Not that Wolverine in any way represents the full breadth of Western masterpieces to be distributed in global movie theaters. And I understand that I am highly generalizing when I approach my thoughts from this angle. But when we look at the history of fight sequences in Asian-style film, we see that the camera remains at a substantial distance from the action, to capture it all, almost in an amateur way (akin to a home video).

A great example of that withdrawn style occurs in Asian martial arts cinema. One of my favorite movies happens to be Chia-Liang Liu’s Hong Xi Guan (1977, translated as “Executioners From Shaolin”), which stars Chia Hui Liu (Gordon Liu) as Tung Tien Chin, who fights against and ultimately defeats Pai Mei (Gordon Liu would later go on to play his enemy Pai Mai in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill 2).

The final fight scene from Hong Xi Guan.

As you can see in the clip, the camera tends to keep its distance from the fighters, attempting to encompass (and hence respect) the entirety of the choreography in its original form. Instead of the film, here the choreography is the art.

Again, I must repeat that my interpretations rely completely on generalizations. But even if we look at a modern interpretation of martial art cinema, we see similar camera techniques that do not infringe on the choreography as performed.

A fight scene from Wo Hu Cang Long.

In this fight sequence from Ang Lee’s Wo Hu Cang Long (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), we can easily perceive the increased amount of editing at work. However, the close-up camera shots tend to focus on either 1) the characters, specifically their visceral reactions, and 2) particular events in the fight (eg., a chair being hit and breaking apart). Besides these added cuts (which I could argue are made possible due to a larger budget compared to the ’70s production of Hong Xi Guan), the main movements of the camera are from a relative distance, encapsulating all of the action within the camera’s frame.

A fight scene from The Matrix.

Similar camera techniques are used in the fight sequence from the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix (1999). We clearly see the influence that Asian martial arts cinema played on the film’s choreography, but the distanced camera shots also provide evidence for the same inspiration. Perhaps, though, that film technique developed out of the use of authentic Hong Kong martial arts choreographers during the production of the movie.

All in all, I’m not sure how to approach Wolverine‘s “fast cutting” choreographic techniques. Should we see them as basically bad film etiquette? Or perhaps this is a new style of modern choreography (though in my opinion one of bad taste)? If you’ve seen the movie, what is your take on the issue?