(low effort)I hate the way people analyze movie fight scenes, this is not what real film criticism looks like guys.

#Part 1: A simple metaphor.

I want you to join me on a thought experiment for a second. I want you to imagine that you are a baker, you own your own pastry restaurant and have just slaved over a hot oven to make a delicious slice of chocolate cake, all ready for the local food critic to have a taste and give their thoughts on it.

The critic arrives, wordlessly takes the cake. You watch with bated breath.... then to your dismay and horror the critic drops the cake on the ground outside on the messy sidewalk. They sit for a moment, watching it gather dirt and get swarmed by ants. They then stamp on the cake with their dirty boots, smushing it hard to get as much dirt in there as possible.

They finally take the dirty, stinky, bug riddled mess of your hopes and dreams and have a bite then leave. The next day you pick up the news paper, fingers trembling as you read the review:

"THIS CHOCOLATE CAKE IS OBJECTIVELY BAD BECAUSE IT TASTES LIKE DIRT, ANTS AND THE UNDERSIDE OF MY BOOT."

If you can understand why that is an unfair metric to analyze food you can probably understand why I dislike how people analyze fight scenes.

#Part 2: This is not real film criticism.

I'll put it bluntly, the way youtube """""""""""""""CRITICS""""""""""""""""""" analyze movie fight scenes is terrible. It is always the same, a long detailed play by play of the fight scene slowed down, zoomed in and with the volume turned off and then pointing at flubs you otherwise would not have noticed.

I mean yes, if you turn the volume off and slow down a fight scene and zoom in on the background extras you'll see flubs. moments where the enemy should have landed a kill and didn't, vanishing weapons, punches that don't connect etc. Congratulations, you worked out that the characters aren't actually fighting each other. Well done.

I shouldn't have to explain this to people but movie fights aren't supposed to be watched this way. You aren't supposed to zoom in on what the background extras in a crowd are doing, that's why focal points in shots exist in the first place. You aren't supposed to turn the music and sound off, that's there for atmosphere and yes if you slow down every single clip and go frame by frame by frame you will definitely spot flubs because the actors aren't actually fighting each other.

Fight scenes are not meant to be watched this way

They are carefully constructed illusions designed to move fast and to convey excitement and energy to a scene. They are not meant to be slowed down, zoomed in and overanalyzed frame by frame. Seriously I'm supposed to pretend this is a profound discovery?

It has become all the rage now to do this, to act like a fight scene having flubs is some kind of measure of abject quality. A sequence that lasts less than ten seconds gets analyzed for two minutes brother it's not meant to be the main focus of the scene, it is literally a ten second action scene. It's supposed to go by fast, you aren't supposed to dissect it like that.

I dislike the idea that this is actually valuable or valid criticism. Because I don't think it's fair to expect filmmakers to have to painstakingly go through every microsecond of their action scenes frame by frame to make sure it's 1000000000% perfect lest some pedantic Rantsona on youtube rant for ten minutes about it being objectively bad. That is just effort wasted.

People will talk about the vanishing dagger in Last Jedi until the cows come home but I promise you none of you mother fuckers noticed that in the cinema opening night. And that's because the fast pace, camera focal point and music and performances are designed to cover up the flubs.

#Part 3: It's bad faith and relies on double standards.

Something important to realize is this criticism is never dolled out equally, whether or not a movie will get the 'extra attention' by youtube """""""""""""CRITICS""""""""""""""" depends entirely on whether or not the movie in question is an acceptable target.

Case in point we can talk about the vanishing dagger in Last Jedi but we aren't allowed to discuss the curious case of Luke's Force Kick in Return of the Jedi. Hell I'm old enough to remember when the prequel fights were considered overly choreographed and fake, but now thanks to memes we've all been gaslit into thinking the prequels are somehow beyond criticism even though they share all the same flaws.

And that's the rub here, this isn't me being annoyed at people shitting on the sequels (in isolation) its the way we've decided to arbitrarily not treat movies with the same standard. Like I'm going to tear the prequels down a peg right now by showing the flaws.

Hey did you notice at 40 seconds into the fight with Palpatine and the Jedi council Palps leaves himself completely open to attack and all the dude with the green lightsaber has to do is swing down and he would have saved the galaxy? And he just doesn't because then the movie would be over. Is this now a fight scene fail? Objectively bad? Sign that hollywood is dying? Or do we just meme on that and move on?

Hey want to see what people thought of the Duel of the Fates in the early days of the internet, where slowing down and speeding up revealed how often the actors were leading each other in the fight, pulling punches and deliberately missing each other?

Heck, my honest opinion of the Anakin Obi Wan duel is that it's hilariously bad. It starts strong but it never stops. It gets silly when they start running on scaffolding, it gets ridiculous when they’re climbing a structure swinging at each other, it gets absurd when they’re swinging on ropes at each other like Tarzan and fucking hilarious when they bring the structure down and by the time they’re floating on the lava river on convenient Mario platforms that keep conveniently moving close enough to swing at each other I completely check out.

At that moment the scene loses all emotion and becomes a fucking parody of itself. To say nothing of “from my point of view the Jedi are evil” and “I have the high ground”. We used to acknowledge that was bad dialogue but then Le epic memes gaslit us into thinking it’s actually genius. A more economic screenplay can come up with a better way for Anakin to get burned up by lava after the duel than this, but the fight is too self indulgent and goes on too long

We get blinded by nostalgia, we overlook the flaws in some fight scenes but hyper analyze the flaws in others. If criticism isn't leveled fairly then it's arbitrary. Movie fight scenes are inherently unrealistic. One man could not fight twenty people at once, that's just not possible. So there will always be a level of suspension of disbelief, so you have to be willing to go with it to a certain degree.

(and it's not lost on me that a lot of these """"""""""critics"""""""" seem way harsher on movies starring women and minorities than they are movies starring white men.)

#Part 4: It's a grift

The kind of people that make these kinds of content usually have a goal. To convince their audience that the media being put under scrutiny is "objectively bad" to feed their egos by telling them that not liking something is actually the smarter nay scientifically correct position to have and that they are the smart white boys (and fuck off pretending Critical Drinker and co are trying to appeal to any other demographic) for not liking something.

It's not enough for these guys to not like the Last Jedi subjectively, they need to be told they are the objectively correct for disliking it so they will accept a few flubs in a fight scene (that you have to slow down, zoom in or watch background extras to even notice) as "proof" of that, but then when something like Revenge of the Sith has stupid shit like this they either ignore it or write a 500 page serial killer manifesto about why it's secretly genius.

Grifters are lying to you, they rely on your selective memory, inherent bias and lack of media literacy to convince you to give them your time and money and views and in turn they get to pretend that they're actually saying something meaningful by revealing that if you slow a fight scene down to 800% you can see punches fail to connect.

I'd really like you to watch the first video I linked because it highlights the double standard really well. People half remember fight scenes from several years ago, think they are flawless and perfect and either overlook the flaws or blocked them from their memory. I remember thinking the fight scenes from the movie Equilibrium were really good. Watched it again as an adult recently and they aren't notice how the guards just kinda stand there even though they have easy shots on him?

The video itself highlights how people treated the test footage fight scene in Echo but kind of ignored that if you gave the legendary Daredevil Hallway scene the same treatment you'd see the same flubs.

This is not to say that all fight scenes are exactly the same, or that all flubs are equal. Some are visually obvious no matter the speed, like the one in Equilibrium. But the way we try to dissect fight scenes, stripping them of editing and sound and context is a bad way to analyze media. I promise you every single movie fight scene in history would look like shit if it got meticulously picked apart like this.

#Part 5: There's more to fight scenes than passing the cinema sins test.

I love the Throne Room fight in Last Jedi. The vanishing dagger or a few hits missing from the guards don't ruin it for me anymore than I'm guessing Palpatine leaving his back exposed to attack or Obi Wan and Anakin spinning lightsabers or every time the characters dodged each other in TPM ruined those fights for you.

Because for me what makes it great is the emotion. Hero and Villain fighting back to back. The strong red contrasts, the way the room gets engulfed in flame, the way the fighting actually feels violent and brutal, whether its Rey getting overpowered twice and having to slit someone's throat, Ben impaling a guy and pushing him into a blender and of course the way he basically uses the lightsaber like a gun.

It's visceral, emotional, violent and there's a compelling argument to be made that it's a metaphor for sex and the pretentious side of me loves that. Now that's just one example but my point is yes there's a vanishing dagger, yes the background extras are often confused, yes Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver occasionally miss their marks. But these are flaws in all the Star Wars movies, not just this one. Pretending that now it has to pass an absurdly complicated sniff test is ridiculous.

Analyzing movie fight scenes can be fun, I won't pretend that isn't true. But remember, it is still fiction. At the end of the day the characters aren't really fighting, and if you dig hard enough you can find the flubs. That doesn't prove anything though.

Heck Buffy the Vampire Slayer is my favorite TV show of all time and there are multiple times where you can straight up see where they swapped out the actors for stunt doubles. That doesn't make it "objectively bad".

Can we just finally please stop pretending this laser focused cinemasins shit is actual movie criticism? It's not now, nor will it ever be.

Like what you like, just don't indulge in bad faith criticism in the process.