On why ONG-BAK: THE THAI WARRIOR worked in every way that TRANSFORMERS didn't.
Ong-Bak was a 2003 film that I'd intended to see in the theaters, but never got around to. It was on sale for pretty cheap, so I picked it up, and I'm glad I did
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... see, technology makes a lot of difference in what the human body can do. To take a sport I'm familar with, Women's gymnastics, specifically bars (young female body whipping around two parrell wooden poles at different heights). How springy those bars are makes a *lot* of difference in what you can do; in what is just within the bounds of physics, and what is outside it; in what is impressive athletics, and what isn't.
The thing is, you can't tell by looking how springy the bars are... if you're very good, and very familiar with the equipment, you might be able to tell from how the equipment reacts when it' used; but most people aren't that good (I'm not, and I'm one step ahead of most people in that I at least know there is something to look for).
The same thing happens with the floor excercise; when I was first taking gymnastics, this was a bare floor with matting and a carpet over it. In the early to mid eighties (about when I got out of gymnastics) they started putting springs underneath it. Now-a-days the springs are... well... amazingly powerful.
People started doing some *really* fantastic tumbling tricks at that time. And I was completely unimpressed because, well, it wasn't because they were cooler athletes. It was because someone put springs under their feet (or, in the case of the bars, on their hips).
And that's pretty much how I feel about movie athletics... movies are fake... of course they use technology to enhance the athleticism of the actors... and of course they hide it, because it looks cooler that way. So anything that I see is, well, not actually as cool as it looks.
To me, a martial arts fight is just as fake as a fight using CGI...
Kiralee
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