MyDoorsAreOpen
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2003
- Messages
- 8,549
Like gunfight and martial arts scenes, car chases are essentially choreographed dances -- they're all about really jaw-dropping moves. Any second-rate cartoonist knows how to loop a background really fast behind two (actually motionless) cars, one upstage of the other, while the drivers try to hit, shoot, or fling stuff at each other.
Again, as with fighting scenes, I think chase scenes really belong in two categories that can't be compared:
1) ones that use only real stunts, and are judged on how hard they must have been to pull off for the camera.
2) ones that use as much CGI as they want, even stretching the limits of believability, and are judged based on how intense they are to watch.
My favorite in category 1 is the climax of Blues Brothers, especially since it manages to capture the humor of the classic caper chase scene (something of a lost art today). As for category 2, I was pretty impressed by the highway truck scene in the second Matrix movie. Although that scene did less to move the plot along and more just to show off what could be done with computer graphics, it's more of a gem than pretty much the whole rest of the movie, IMHO.
Again, as with fighting scenes, I think chase scenes really belong in two categories that can't be compared:
1) ones that use only real stunts, and are judged on how hard they must have been to pull off for the camera.
2) ones that use as much CGI as they want, even stretching the limits of believability, and are judged based on how intense they are to watch.
My favorite in category 1 is the climax of Blues Brothers, especially since it manages to capture the humor of the classic caper chase scene (something of a lost art today). As for category 2, I was pretty impressed by the highway truck scene in the second Matrix movie. Although that scene did less to move the plot along and more just to show off what could be done with computer graphics, it's more of a gem than pretty much the whole rest of the movie, IMHO.
