Steering swordplay

Movie action is designed to not only look good but also sound good. The ubiquitous punching sound for physical contact is obviously enhanced. What kind of body will yield such a slightly hollow and wildly amplified sound when hit - other than a puffed-up pillow?

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The most fascinating thing about martial arts as exhibited on the Chinese screen is the tendency to venture into the fantasyland.

Hollywood action flicks are not realistic in their action scenes either, but they usually adhere to a logic that makes sense of the action. If the action is humanly impossible, Hollywood will provide a "scientific" justification, so that Spiderman, Batman or Superman will function without audiences collectively scratching their heads.

In a Chinese movie, a hero may catch flying arrows with bare hands, but the audience is rarely told how this craft became plausible.

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Chinese wuxia films fly in and out of the fantasy realm as if it's taken for granted. However, audience reception depends on how dexterously the film treats such details. How much the action scenes are heightened, so to speak, should have an inner logic.

In Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, flying starts with fast running - so fast the feet on the roof are increasingly floating on thin air. Only in the second half does full-force flying take place.

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Suppose the two scenes are reversed. I can guarantee the second one will not have the impact it was designed for. In a sense, flying is the ultimate test for wuxia movies that depict supernatural skills. If the audience laughs, it means it is rendered ridiculous; if there is a gasp of wow, it has sent the heart palpitating.

In a way, the best flying I have seen is still the bike-riding scene in Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

Peter Chan's Wu Xia - a.k.a. Swordsmen or Dragon - is revolutionary in that it attempts to rationalize all the Herculean tricks with Sherlock Holmes-like precision. To look at it from a cultural perspective, he gave himself the daunting task of fusing Western science with Eastern metaphysics. The computer-generated imagery of the human organs bearing the brunt of a punch is an honorable effort at explaining the unexplainable.

Just as traditional Chinese medicine is for the converted, screen kung fu is built on a premise that it will involve actions not humanly possible. What Chan did was tantamount to Pixar using all 23 million balloons that were technically needed to lift the house in Up. It would be like a tether that binds a flight of fancy.

The real challenge that faces Chinese wuxia is new human movements that are different from the tried-and-true. The martial-arts world needs its own equivalent of Isadora Duncan, who revolutionized the body language of ballet. The current crop of choreographers, most of them Hong Kong raised, have done so many movies that it is understandable they are running out of inspiration.