the trouble with teleporters is that it's really hard to take advantage of
how awesome their powers are without leaving your audience a bit spatially
embarrassed I mean fight scene continuity is difficult
enough without having someone who can cross the intervening spaces without
actually moving right but I promise you it can be done the opening scene of X2
x-men United or x-men 2 as...well as I call it shows us "Kurt Wagner but in the
Munich circus I was known at the incredible Nightcrawler" sneaking out of
a White House tour group to invade the Oval Office and kill the President
with Mozart as a backing track I like it I mean spoilers he does not succeed and
also he was being mind-controlled at the time but it's still a really great use
of your teleporter and we're gonna talk about why this is one X-cellent scene my
name is Jill Bearup and one of the top five things I'm looking forward to doing
once we're all allowed to be in the same room as each other again is stage combat
which is to say pretending to beat people up for acting purposes which is
one of the reasons I take a keen interest in dissecting movie fights not
just from a technique perspective but from a storytelling perspective too and
that's what we do on this channel so let's get to it although one quick note
before we start I came in with a definite bias that kind of hampered my
enjoyment of the scene the first time around you see I know who Nightcrawler
is and he's one of my favorites and making him attack the president made me
think that this was going to be character assassination of the highest
order How very dare you! I was much more vehement
about this kind of thing of 2003 apparently I mean the x-men movies do
tend to go kind of dark and leather so it makes sense that they would not be
emphasizing the fuzzy bunny screwball aspects of Kurt's character but still a
little bit more levity would have been nice? A smidge?
never mind once I knew that this was just an action set piece where
Nightcrawler is being controlled and has no free will it made a lot more sense
and from a choreography and effects perspective it's just GOOD. well okay not
this bit where he teleports in a straight line closer to the gun that is
shooting bullets at him because really but apart from that. Look at this look how
beautiful and creepy and informative it is but we'll get there a brief
chronological run down before we start X2 opens with Xavier monologuing, there are some
vertigo-inducing credits and we begin properly with the white house tour and a
thematically appropriate quote "we are not enemies but friends
we must not be enemies" cut to the Oval Office our mysterious figure
wanders off the sound design kicks in and we pause for a moment with JFK back to
the Oval Office and then off we go Nightcrawler disarms some guards
teleports all over the place so nobody is sure where he is or how many of him
there are and gets closer and closer to the Oval Office
then he's outside the Oval Office now he's into the Oval Office now I've got
you right where I want you he gets shot and disappears, end scene. I often say on
this channel that good fight scenes give you character details as well as doing
things like advancing the plot and world building that's not really relevant in
this case because he's being mind-controlled but the other stuff
works very well and it looks so nice the multiple teleports per shot were so
captivating that it took me several goes through to remember that people can
actually teleport and so this was probably a really big pain in the
backside to put together but so worth it because it looks and well that's a
really great effect and it does make Kurt look really badass the things I was
most impressed by in this scene were how it gives you a sense of geography
and how it builds up the tension. action scenes are obviously supposed to be
tense you're supposed to be on the edge of your seat thinking what's going to
happen next and that tension should rise and fall while rising over all over the
course of the scene you know to keep things interesting but if you can't
really tell what's going on it robs you of that excitement and that tension and
you're just kind of left confused the white house set is a bunch of fairly
neutrally decorated corridors and fairly neutrally decorated rooms how then can
you give the impression that Nightcrawler has to cover distance to
get to the Oval Office? with running and jumping and teleporting and then how do
you give the impression that he's so fast so all over the building that they
think that he's multiple people? that's more difficult but they do a pretty good
job of it we'd have a really hard time telegraphing that the many many Secret
Service people are in fact several sets of distinct Secret Service people some
confusion is all right because it is meant to be ambiguous but we do need a
little bit of tell as well as show to explain to us that we're in several
different locations around the building and not just moving linearly toward the
Oval Office so here's how they do it 1. We keep cutting back to the Oval
Office which reminds us where Nightcrawler is aiming for and ratchets
up the tension as he gets closer 2. the Secret Service people talk to each other
a lot about where Nightcrawler is including because he's moving so quickly
and teleporting all over the place that he's not one person he's actually
multiple people and so none of the exits are secure
which is why they lock down the president in the Oval Office instead of
trying to get him up they seek him here they seek him there those agents seek
him everywhere 3. we take the time to swoop out through the peephole of the
Oval Office into the office right outside for Nightcrawlers arrival there
which gives us both a little bit of a breather in the action and also a chance
to process exactly how close he is before we get into it and then having
given us that breather in order to ratchet the tension back up again we
don't see most of what he does in the office right outside we listen to the
gunfire we faintly hear this under the teleports but we like The Secret Service
agents and the president just have to wait as in horror the tensest parts are
where you can't see the monster but you know it's there and then in we go and I
love this I love the detail of the outer room being full of smoke from all the
teleporting Kurt has been doing it's supernatural and otherworldly and scary
and confusing and it's such a good use of slow-motion and even though one might
have been expecting slow motion it works really well in 2003 when x2 came out
everybody and their granny was still big into matrix style bullet time action
scenes or at the very least throwing in some slow-mo so it feels a bit matrix
the matrix does it not just as a stylistic choice though there is a bit
of that but also to underline Neos ability to move and react a pace that
can't be read correctly by the human eye and so we get both the real-time
interactions which are impossibly fast much too fast for us to process and the
slow motion section so we can actually see what's going on and not just think
oh he moves very fast how lovely. teleporters, like people who can move
really fast have the problem in cinema that if you use them to the fullest
extent of their abilities then you have to be really careful to show exactly
what's going on otherwise the audience are just like the 2008 movie Jumper has
multiple teleporters with effectively unlimited range and yet is still less
impressive than x2 when they come to use it for combat the cuts are so fast and
so bewilderingly chosen why why so many cuts why in these places that it's
nigh impossible to keep track of what's happening and you're just left feeling
like you're missing something and then even at the end of jumper when they
actually have a teleporter on teleporter fight which
takes place across multiple locations it's still insanely fast editing in that
whole shaky cam thing it just makes it a bit vertigo-inducing teleporters are
cool we can do better than this case in point to make Nightcrawler look
impressive he needs to move and teleport fast faster than we can reasonably
process over more than say two maybe three opponents so it makes perfect
sense to have the longer shot on some tracking and to slow down and it looks
amazing I love the multiple teleports per cut I
love that it's slow enough that we can really follow it and I love the varying
heights and positions and to which he teleports now you're thinking with
Porters! Teleporters... I'll work on that top-notch use of the three dimensions in
which he can move is what I'm saying and all of these things combine to give us
what I think is the best scene in the entire movie which is just as well
becauseNightcrawler is somewhat underused in the actually doing things sense for
most of the rest of the runtime but then I would think that regardless thanks for
watching one x-cellent scene with me if you're interested in movie fights and
how they can tell us things about character story world all of that jazz
then you should stick around and subscribe though you should also
probably ring the bell or you may never see me again thanks YouTube never mind
hope to see you next time