When a character can go out for a night of drinking, partying, and wake up the next morning fresh as a daisy despite going to bed absolutely wasted, that’s movie magic. If a character is knocked out of a second-story window to land on the ground and can bounce back up to keep fighting or to run away at full speed, that’s movie magic. The long and short of it is that movie magic is something used to bypass the realism that many people know would otherwise crush a movie’s chance of appearing to be as impressive as possible in order to gain and keep the attention of the audience. It’s a way to keep the reality of a situation from interfering with the movie in a logical manner that might derail things in a big way. Some of the most interesting questions are also those that would end up destroying the movie by inserting logic into key points that wouldn’t exactly be welcome. A good example is to be made by using the image above. Bypassing the idea of ghosts and the reanimated dead for a moment, the shark in the picture shouldn’t be able to swim, let alone leap out of the water like this with most of its musculature rotted away.
But that’s the thing about movie magic, it’s there to make the improbable a possibility and give people a thrill when it comes to watching things that shouldn’t be able to happen. Quite a few movies have relied on this over the years since the unfortunate fact is that while reality can be entertaining, it’s not always what people want. We see reality every day when we wake up, or we see our version of it at least, and in doing so we find that at times we want to see things that aren’t as real and that wouldn’t have a chance of happening in the real world but are fun to watch for entertainment. Getting back to the zombie aspect for a moment, there are plenty of movies and even shows that wouldn’t be possible since the loss of muscle, the deterioration of the needed tissues to continue to move about, would be a serious hindrance to reanimation. There’s even a point in Shaun of the Dead when the ‘girl in the garden’ falls back and punches a hole through the middle of her body.
If the hole missed her spine, then all is well enough to continue, but it looks as though the hole goes right through the middle of her, which means a portion of her spine is gone. When last I checked, even a zombie needs a spine to move about, since otherwise the girl, Mary, would have been able to flop about on the ground, but not do much more than this. Surprisingly there’s not much on this, since a lot of people bought into the movie magic of this moment, but when you think about it, damage to the backbone is actually rather significant in what it will do to a body. But again, this is what movie magic does, since it’s all about making the impossible entertaining and fashioning elements that are otherwise ridiculous into moments that people will find amazing.
One franchise that’s made its popularity happen with a lot of movie magic is the Fast and the Furious since the realism that might exist in this movie kind of died out with the first movie, which still relied heavily on a lot of things that might have never been possible in the real world. The stunts and amazing moments that these movies show us with each movie simply aren’t possible in the real world, no matter how much someone might try to replicate them. That’s not a challenge, so please don’t, but the point is that movie magic has gone a long way at times when it comes to being used to showcase one scene after another that might look real enough to some people but is simply not possible, many people know. Simple fights are another good way to measure movie magic since this is an issue that has been resolved quite a bit over the years when it comes to people throwing hands with each other.
The human body is reactive when it comes to taking damage, as any time that a human body comes into contact with a hard or sharp surface, something is going to happen. Even when a person hits someone or something, their knuckles will end up getting red, or they’ll split and bleed from the impact since this is natural. Movies that depict fistfights in which the combatants suffer little to no damage aren’t realistic at all most times since the body can take a great deal of punishment, but usually not without showing some sign of trauma. Movie magic is great since it dials down the realism and lets people enjoy their favorite movie or TV show in a way that doesn’t force them to endure the realism as much.
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