Actual bus operator critiques that fight scene from Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings
What would happen in a real fight on a bus between a guy with secret fighting skills and a guy with a sword for a hand?
Film Features Shang-Chi
Scientists love to chime in on sci-fi/ fantasy movies whenever something stretches the natural laws of the real world, like how you shouldn’t be able to hear any sounds in space, or how lightsabers would never really work, or how the moon isn’t really an artificial shell built around some kind of alien hive, but those complaints are boooring and have no real bearing on the real world. We don’t know how physics works in the Star Wars universe, and maybe Moonfall is totally accurate and we just haven’t realized it yet?
One thing that does have bearing on the real world, though, is the bus fight scene early in Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings. Buses exist in the real world, and some people know enough about buses to recognize when things about them do or do not make sense!
One such bus expert is (apparently) Twitter user that_mc (a.k.a. “Mack, yes, That Mack”), who claims to be a real-life bus operator in San Francisco and finally got around to seeing Shang-Chi. In a thrillingly lengthy Twitter thread, that_mc breaks down the bus fight nearly shot-for-shot, addressing the aspects of it that don’t make sense and the surprising number of things that really do—considering the fight scene involves “Shaun” fighting a guy with a laser sword for an arm, and we all know laser swords aren’t real (eyeroll).
The main issue here, rather than anything about how the bus looks or its viability as the setting for a fight scene, is that the bus operator in the movie doesn’t react to basically anything the way he should. He doesn’t use his mirrors and he doesn’t use his emergency brakes when things start getting wild, but even worse, when he gets hit and falls out of his seat, it turns out that he’s not even wearing a seat belt. That means no workers’ comp for the guy.
But some things are still dead-on: Someone immediately filming the fight would “Definitely Happen,” the fire extinguisher that Awkwafina uses to bop the sword guy is there “for exactly these situations” (funny!), and bus operators all love it when discarded scooters get demolished during runaway bus fight scenes.
This is all useful information, and hopefully it will inspire Hollywood to be a little smarter the next time someone stages a bus fight between a guy with a sword hand and a guy with secret martial arts powers that he learned from his mean terrorist father.
120 Comments
Of all the things that I found wildly fantastical in the movie (which I loved!) — unrealistic action scenes, an underground fighting ring for superpowered individuals, mystical villages, dragons, Awkwafina learning how to be a Hawk Eye level archer in like 4 days (less?), faceless chicken cats, Ben Kingsley — the thing that kept throwing me off was the mechanics of sword-arm-guy’s sword. Where exactly does the blade go when it’s not in use? Into his forearm? It’s longer than his forearm. When retracted, the base of the blade would go past his elbow, meaning he wouldn’t be able to bend his arm…
Ot acts like one of those retractable/extendable light saber toys from the 80s
Making a big assumption lightsaber toys don’t work like that today…
Nowadays toy lightsabers take off more hands than a roller skate caught in a lawnmower blade.
Wow, where did you get that comparison? Did this happen to you? Or that kid Randy Beaman?
Pym Particles.
Maybe it like, phases or teleports into/out of position?MCU version of this guy at least conceded that he should at least have one normal hand. IIRC, in the comics, he had two if those things.
two??? HOW DOES HE WIPE HIS ASS???
Bidet, my man. Wenzhou treats his minions to luxury. Ass luxury.
Tune in next week to find out . . . HOW HE WIPES HIS ASS WITH THOSE THINGS!
See also: Wolverine’s claws in most portrayals.
Anyway, I rationalized it by figuring his humerus had been replaced as well, and acted as the chamber for his sword thing.
I wouldn’t call Awkwafina a Hawkeye-level archer, just because she landed one shot, the target being a giant monster’s giant throat. I’m pretty sure I could have hit that after a few days training with a bow.
I couldn’t, that monster was way the hell up in the air. They weren’t even composite bows.
The bow was made of magic dragon scales and was therefore better than a similar bow made of mundane materials. For reasons.
I’d buy that.By which I mean literally, I’d buy the bow if they sold an authorized version in stores. They did look pretty cool.
authorized by whom?
The dragon, I assume
Bruce Lee?
I dunno, that shot, out of all the fantastical handwaving I was fine with, was the thing that ultimately took me out of the movie.
Maybe it gets bigger when he gets excited?
Ok, I’m NOT fighting him!
Some kind of nanotech? By Endgame, Tony stores his whole ironman suit in a little house on his chest.
Like this except not made out of tinfoil
I wonder how heavy that thing is.
Hey, I heard Caitlin’s marrying an Asian drum major!
Not to get weird and obscure about it, but could it be like the Dragon’s Tooth Sword from the original Deus Ex, where the blade is made out of some nanotech BS that forms and collapses as needed?
Nanotech, bby! 😎
It’s all nanites. Stark nanites. Even dead, his tech keeps finding its way into the wrong hands.
Is there anything that Awkwafina can’t do?
lmao she became a world-saver in like 22hrs tops
“Ancient immortal warlord here, nine centuries’ experience running my own criminal empire. Finally got to watch Shang-Chi at the weekend, and hoo-boy do we have to talk about the logistics of the Ten Rings. 1/”
You cannot let your henchmen just die all willy nilly. The pawns maybe, but quality lieutenants don’t just grow on trees.
Username checks out.
We don’t know how physics works in the Star Wars universe
Isn’t it supposed to be our universe? “A long time ago, in a galaxy, far, far, away” as the text went. Just like how Middle Earth isn’t supposed to be some other planet, but our own Earth in the distant past — the sunken kingdom of Númenor is also known as Atalantë — that is, Atlantis.
Except that both universes feature magic powers, which, as far as anyone can tell, ours does not.
As Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.
Dandy, but “Star Wars” is pretty explicit is saying the Force is a natural product of living things, not technology.
Part of the conceit is that magic or magic like powers exist in our universe. Because it’s fiction.
Not anymore, and not with that attitude.
With Star Wars “far, far away” doesn’t have to just mean in kilometers but in alternate universes as well.Lord of the Rings being on our actual Earth would be ridiculous because it would either have to have taken place not just after Homo sapiens evolved, but after we developed the level of technology in the story which would leave all sorts of evidence that orcs existed, or this would have all happened, got wiped out for the dinosaurs, then humans evolved again. No, it would have to take place in a Lord of the Rings universe.
I mean… Yes, The Lord of the Rings taking place on Earth 1000s of years ago would be absolutely ridiculous… But it’s also canonically true. Like, this isn’t a huge secret or anything. Tolkien claimed that the books were not HIS invention. He just translated them from Elvish into English. So, for example, Merry? Yeah, that’s not his real name, Tolkien just made it up. His REAL name is Chilimanzar.Tolkien wanted to create a mythology for Britain, regardless of how much it clashed with science, so… Middle-Earth is just Earth a long time ago.
It’s fiction. I’m not going to pretend that these stories actually took place on our Earth in our universe.
Maybe there’s miscommunication. Nobody is saying that these stories are actual history, just that the conceit of the story is that they were. Just like how both Star Trek and Dune claim to be visions of our future. But say, the Man in the High Castle didn’t happen in our universe because the Allies didn’t lose WWII — it had to had been a different universe.
And Mordor eventually became Newark.
It’s literally canon in the books. Middle Earth is the past of our Earth.
It’s literally not. Never mentioned in works published before he died and he changed his mind much later anyways after realizing it wouldn’t work.
It’s pretty heavily implied in the intro to The Hobbit even if we leave all extra material out.
It certainly is mentioned, if you count LOTR’s prologue and appendix, in the standard editions of the books published while he was alive. In these you learn that hobbits are “rare these days” and that the continents have changed since the Third Age. These comments only make sense if you accept that Middle Earth is our world in the past. Also, the whole literary conceit that Tolkien was merely acting as a translator of books he’d found like the “Red Book of Westmarch” (as others have mentioned) depends on it
Yeah. I mean, it’s ok if it’s literally impossible and that there aren’t any fossils. Or that the continents aren’t quite right. And maybe the scale of Tolkien’s Middle Earth isn’t as big as we think. Maybe it all took place in ancient New Jersey.
That was before he changed his mind, but you’re right.
Fictional canon doesn’t apply to the real world.
What. I mean, it’s the past of our Earth the way Star Trek is “the future of our Earth”
Not only is a lot of the tech pretty much magic, have you seen people? There’s no way we’d get along that well and we’re pretty much intent on not having a future.
Well, yeah, it’s… fiction.
I have not seen people.
No, but it applies to the fictional world. Noone is arguing that these stories really took place.By your logic, Greek or Arthurian myth couldn’t be set on Earth either.
All this nonsense is because of people getting upset over “other universes” because these stories are “on our Earth” instead of a fictional alternate Earth where they take place. I never said they couldn’t take place on an Earth where those stories could happen.
That makes no sense. The Middle Earth stories cannot exist on an “alternate” Earth, because only one Earth exists in the narrative.You’re insisting it cannot represent the real world, because the real world differs from the fictional one; but the only way that argument makes the slightest bit of sense is if you cannot discern fiction from reality.I sincerely hope you’re just trolling here.
I’m not, but I can’t believe how worked up people are getting over fictional universes and calling a world that differs from ours an alternate Earth. It doesn’t seem like I’m the one unable to discern fiction from reality.Anyway, I’m done with this. Feel free to have any last words.
T-Rex existed for two million years, has an estimated total population of 2.5 billion, and is represented by about three dozen adult fossils globally. There are otherwise completely unknown genetic ancestors from the homo genus preserved in our DNA. The continents only roughly assumed their present configuration in the Cenozoic, which started around 66 million years ago, a drop in the bucket compared to the 4.54 billion years or so that Earth has existed. Also the LOTR has literal magic.
It’s not particularly likely, but there are a lot of corners of the planet’s history where something totally unfathomable to us now could hide.
Tolkien basically used the the same conceit that the Conan stories used which are set in a “Hyperborian Age” before the dawn of history as we know it. You don’t have to assume anything about humans re-evolving, just that records from this previous time were lost. Biologically modern humans existed for hundreds of thousands of years before the Sumerians (which is the earliest civilization we have records from and that was less than 6000 years ago). There’s a lot of time for civilizations to have come into existence, fall, and be forgotten in.
Conan the Barbarian universe has a good(ish) explanation which kind of works for LoTR as well. The Hyborian age is in the past, after humans evolved (100000 BC) but before recorded history (5000 BC). This world existed with humans and medievalish technology but all evidence of it was wiped out. Without plastic it’s feasible (but unlikely) that a human civilisation could have gotten pretty big, been wiped out and left “no trace”.
Now you made me curious about how our modern day would be like with the past history like LOTR or Game of Thrones
Lord of the Rings being on our actual Earth would be ridiculous because…See also: The Bible.
They probably should have gone with “…a universe far, far away” to explain away having sound in the vacuum of space and every planet’s gravity being equal irrespective of mass.
Middle Earth being our planet is something that Tolkien sorta waffled back and forth on over the years. the main issue being the mythology of the creation of the sun and moon that he toyed with changing but decided against. Opting to stay with the more lyrical version he’d used in the Silmarillon
The plural of ‘bus’ is ‘buses’. A ‘buss’ is an archaic word for ‘kiss’, ‘busses’ is its plural.
That was a blunder.
Arr. Ye be right, matey.
So forced bussing is sexual assault?
“Busses was the preferred form in Merriam-Webster dictionaries until 1961.”
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/plural-of-bus
So in other words, it’s spelled “busses” in most red states, “buses” everywhere else
They are also big fans of actor Gary Bussey.
“YOU WANTED THE BEST, YOU GOT IT! THE HOTTEST BAND IN THE LAND . . . BUSS!!!”
As a gay i can tell you buss means something totally different now 😬😬😬
And what is a “bussy”? A word I keep seeing on the internet from people who don’t look like they’re particularly passionate about public transport.
maybe you’re just missing the context.
As a frequent bus rider myself, I have to say I would have been out one of the emergency windows like 5 seconds into that fight.
but then he would’ve lost his pension
You know, if that fight scene took place on a Glaswegian bus, you can guarantee some wee Senga or wee granny would have stormed up to Mr Laser-fist and gi’en him lalldy.
English, Motor Falcon, do you speak it!?
(For those who don’t know: they say “wee” a lot in Glasweg. And not just about peeing.)
I would have loved if they had to stop for five minutes midway through the fight to detach the overhead electrical connector for the bus.
genuine question why do people hate electric scooters? i could imagine people being reckless or careless while riding. i think i would use one if it was a convenient way to get to places.|
One factor is probably because they tend to be ridden on sidewalks rather than bike lanes.
This, and that the dockless rental scooters (common in many cities) tend to be left in the middle of sidewalks when their users are done with them, which is really annoying.
They also tend to be abandoned on sidewalks and other incredibly inconvenient places for pedestrians (the ride share ones).
And left in downright maddening place for some people with disabilities; in wheelchairs etc. to get by.
Omg yes, it’s so goddamn irritating!
One factor is we have woefully lacking bike infrastructure in our cities, which we’ve given over completely to cars.
I’ve only briefly ridden those rental scooters on two occasions and both times were in areas without bike lanes on major streets. I had no choice but to ride on the sidewalk as they aren’t street legal.
I just hate that they get left in the middle of sidewalks. I imagine bus drivers get annoyed at having yet another small, unpredictably moving thing to avoid when they are driving.
Most sympathetic Larry David scene was walking down the street in the previous season premier knocking away scooters on the sidewalk.
Maybe you don’t live in a major metropolitan area where they are popular (LA and SF come to mind) but they end up everywhere: on the sidewalk, in driveways, in the road, blocking bike/bus lanes, in any body of water, in the hands of a drunk person in a late night brawl, etcetcetc. This isn’t even to mention how people ride them when they do use them: drunk, trying to gram while on them, weaving in and out of traffic, on and off sidewalks, etc. I like the idea of them, but seeing them in action/inaction makes many loathe them.
Exactly this. If you’re trying to do anything downtown OTHER than ride a scooter they’re a huge annoyance. And the ones that don’t have docks get recharged by people who literally take them home and get paid to charge them overnight. So you’ll get people in trucks pulling over and stopping wherever one of them happens to be so they can pick them up. You’d think that would be a quick process they always seem to be blocking the turn lane right where you need to make a turn and it always takes forever, becuase they can’t just toss them in the back of their truck. Also my wife and I looked into how much you get paid to recharge them and it turns out the rate they pay you is not that much higher than the cost of electricity. When you figure in the cost of gas along with the time and effort involved it looks like just another shitty gig economy job that looks easy on the surface but requires huge effort to make any meaningful amount of money. So you’ve got these companies that bought a bunch of scooters with VC money, now they’re just sitting back and letting the revenue roll in without having to bother building any infrastructure or do anything to mitigate the nuisance they cause. a perfect example of late stage capitalism subtly fucking people over.
People do tend to be reckless while riding them. As a cyclist, I worry about them because I can’t hear them overtaking me in the cycle lane, and I could easily knock them into traffic if I swerve to avoid a pothole or something.
They’re also a freakin’ hazard for the people who ride them. Those scooter wheels aren’t large or cushioned enough for any sort of debris, and they go too fast to effectively avoid every little crack or bit of crud on the road. My former boss absolutely wrecked himself on one of those things in Nashville by hitting, like, a small rock that got caught up in the front wheel and sent him ass-over-teakettle into the concrete. He broke his arm in three places, his jaw, and his ocular bone.
They’re monetized litter.
It’s not people riding them, it’s just that they get left fucking everywhere and basically end up a big dumb littering hazard.
They represent the worst of mercantilists pretending to be capitalists in their race to externalize every cost.The contribute nothing to the infrastructure they use, they contract out everything that looks like an actual service, and they have no incentive to get their clientele to act responsibly.
Another fun part in the bus fight scene:Apparently some presumably low-level tech working on this film put in a little “Easter Egg” once it was known that the film would not be approved for showing in mainland China:
(Historical note: “8964″ is frequently used in Chinese online discussions as a codeword for the Tianamen Square massacre – because 1989 / June 4)It’s highly unlikely that this number made it into a high profile movie starring a Chinese-American playing a Marvel superhero purely as a coincidence.
Damn, that’s ballsy
Damn, that’s getting CGI’ed out ASAP, and all existing hard-copies of the original version thrown in the chipper, and that poor jobbing bus-driver actor is going to have to learn enough Mandarin to do an apology tour, even though he absolutely did nothing wrong (unless he hand-stitched the numbers into his sleeve the night before? No, that seems farfetched).
I’ve come across a few transit operators on twitter and they are usually pretty amusing. They SEE THINGS, afterall, and have a good sense of humour about life. I’m also pretty entertained by how much this one went into the actual mechanics.
I think the unwitting audience for the John Wick subway fight had the right idea. Sit down, be quiet, get off at the first available stop as quickly as you can!
This is exaactly how you approach all threatening behavior on the subway. Watch very carefully, do nothing to draw attention to yourself, move further back if possible, and exit if necessary.
What varies is considerations of threat level. Like, after a long day, I don’t care how out there you are acting – I am not just giving up my seat on the train as I commute home from work. The scariest it has ever actually been for me on a train was the guy brandishing the boilig pot of coffee he had clearly just grabbed from a restaurant – he was actively trying to keep us from leaving, it was clear the coffee could scald (and it was summer, so a lot of shorts and no sleeves) and you could completely envision him smashing the caraffe to weaponize the glass. He would chase us, and we would run to the other end of the car to exit the far door, but the number of people would cause a bottle neck so not everyone could get out, and he would then go to deliberately block the door, so we would run to the other side of the car to get out the other door. It was like 3 laps back and forth in that car before we could all get out.
I know it’s silly to nitpick accuracy in movies like this, but I do like the “How Real Is It?” series. I love hearing a professional’s opinion on movie scenes. I really love it when the less critically movies get accuracy down a lot better than the critically acclaimed.
Have you ever watched GQ’s “The Breakdown” series? Really fascinating shit there! Highly recommend checking it out on YouTube.
Sure, it’s silly, but it’s fun. As long as you’re not the type of person who gets all worked up about it.
Oh no. I follow the old adage “Just repeat to yourself ‘it’s just a show/film, I should really just relax!”
you people are sad. i’m concerned that you’re unable to tell reality and fantasy apart.
I just figured that the driver was bad at his job. I mean, he wasn’t wearing a seat belt, he had earphones in, he didn’t stop the bus once he realized people were fighting in it. He was just terrible.
The maneuvering of the bus was ridiculous. Those turns were way too sharp. It would have rolled.
The bus driver’s number tag reads “8964″ aka June 4, 1989, the date of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, a banned online topic in China. Someone slipped in an Easter Egg that will piss off all 7 trillion Chinese trolls in the Internet! Yay!
This kind of insider analysis is 100% my jam. Ask me about the FIGHT CLUB “film splices” sometime.
About the FIGHT CLUB film splices sometime?
Well, since you asked!In the film, Tyler’s spliced-in frames of porn hit the screen and we hear an accompanying moan on the soundtrack. But picture and sound are read at different points on a strip of film— the optical sound that corresponds to the onscreen image is about two feet ahead of it (It doesn’t look like Tyler’s booth runs DTS, SDDS or Dolby Digital sound, each of which would raise other questions). So in reality, the image would flash onscreen, and about a full second later the strip would carry that frame past the audio sensor. And that audio wouldn’t be correct for that frame even if they DID hit the screen simultaneously.
I’m a big fan of people who know their cities well tracking where someone is vs where they could realistically be and how long it would take them to get there. There was an episode of Parks and Recreation that was on-location in Chicago where they definitely did this on purpose. Two characters were “taking a walk” and covered something like 20 miles over the course of a conversation as they hit every single recognizably “Chicago” location across the whole city, from the Bean, to Wrigley Field, to the North Shore, to Promontory Point.
that_mc would be “that mick”. Like McDonalds and MacDonalds in Coming to America.
Actual toll collector critiques that love scene from Shang-Tsung And The Legend Of The Ten Beads II: Eccentric Kung-Fu-galoo