I recently watched the remaster of the film, Akira. I had never seen Akira before, so it was interesting looking at it from the perspective of a first-time viewer who has seen a lot of media that was subsequently inspired by it. It was a good watch. But a lot of the fighting scenes felt… off.
Let’s dispense with an obvious criticism. Fight scenes in film are always going to feel a little bit off if you’ve seen the real thing. One of the grisly parts of one of my former jobs was watching actual street fights play out on CCTV footage. From this I learned that actual fighting is brutal, ugly, and short. Victory goes to the first person who picks up a heavy or sharp object. In short, basically the opposite of what you see on screen. Where real fights last seconds, a fight on screen is drawn out over several minutes. Where two combatants trade blows equally on screen, real fights are ugly for the fact that they usually end up being one-sided.
Deep down, I think Hollywood knows this. That’s why when you witness an action scene on screen, it’s not usually called “fighting”, but rather “fight choreography”. And while it is violent, it is not ugly in the sense that real fighting is. A lot of the worst aspects of real fights are sanitized out. Because if they were not, it would be very gruesome to watch, and not particularly satisfying. But the sanitizing process also creates a bit of a problem. How do you know when a fight is actually over? If two characters can trade blows indefinitely, what’s to stop the entire film becoming a fistfight between rubber figurines who always bounce back?
This is where narrative pacing comes in, particularly a concept called power scaling. Power scaling is an idea that originated in gaming. The idea behind power scaling is that when you traverse a gamescape and you constantly level up, your enemies need to get harder to give you a sense of satisfaction as you beat them. But the great insight that I had from watching Akira is that the same scale of pacing has to exist for the villains too, or else the whole thing starts feeling a little bit unnatural. The old David vs Goliath narrative can be satisfying from a hero’s journey standpoint, but it is incredibly frustrating to watch play out on screen if you just watched the villain swamp an entire military and come out completely unscathed, only to be laid low by the hero who has clearly inferior weaponry and not much of a plan.
I’m not going to get into too many spoilers, but I think Akira had a good reason for trying to do this. Akira has a classic hero and antagonist formula. But the interesting thing about that story is that it’s not really about the hero, it’s about the villain. It is a story about how power consumes you in a very literal sense. But this is what feels so weird to me about the fighting that takes place in the film. If the story is more about the villain than the hero, I think it’s okay for fighting to play out a little more realistically in the sense that the hero never really had a chance. But of course that would have deprived us of an entire fight scene. What we find instead was a story of rubber figurines who basically got up and kept fighting over and over and over again until the plot said, “We’re done.” I don’t want to single out Akira too much for this. There are a lot of subsequent films that took inspiration from Akira that had this problem far more.
Ultimately, I think what frustrates me is that fighting doesn’t complement the narrative, and I feel like a lot of Akira‘s successors took the wrong lesson from that film.
But what baffles me even more is that I don’t really know how I would fix this while staying true to Akira‘s story. It is important that the hero actually has a chance, and that he doesn’t give up when he sees the entire military falter. But there is also no practical reason on earth why he shouldn’t instantly be reduced to a pile of ash during his final act of heroism. Maybe this is a rare edge case having a Deus Ex Machina plot MacGuffin actually would make sense. IE, you can’t even fight him until you have X. Because there is clearly magic intervening on the villain’s side, but it is not as clear that the same magic exists for the hero, at least as far as the fight choreography is concerned.
In the end, Akira is a great film. Just… don’t take any lessons from the fighting.
Fight choreography is weird.
