training-in-front-of-a-mirror scene,
I noticed eagle claw and wing chun.
Her goal was not to master the art of
fighting but to develop correct pos-
ture, much the same way that non-
martial arts actors in Chinese kung
fu films were prepped for roles before- Although Salazar did some
of her own stunts, the bulk of the
action came from nine stunt doubles,
including gymnasts, contortionists
and taekwondo/shotokan black belt
Mickey Facchinello.
All Salazar’s scenes used perfor-
mance capture (a step above motion
capture), which simultaneously
digitizes an actor’s body and face
with the goal of building a “photo
real” entity that can interact with
real actors on a photo-real set (as
opposed to a green-screen set). That
yields a unique blend of live and syn-
thetic action in the same frame.
This technology gives actors who
are doing fights a safety net because
each movement need not be fast,
perfect or precise — being able to
miss a target by several feet offers a
huge safety margin when wielding
weapons. During rehearsals, there’s
no need to memorize or practice long
single takes. In postproduction, an
actor’s power, speed, body flexibility
and weapon-wielding viciousness
can be manipulated to match any
from finding the tesseract energy core
from the Avengers.
Before she started shooting, Larson
spent nine months on the martial
path. That included Month 1 to
Month 3 — foundation training before
Avengers: Endgame, Month 3 to
Month 6 — training during Endgame
while shooting 14 to 16 hours a day,
and Month 6 to Month 9 specifically
for Captain Marvel, including two
months of technical stunt and fight
work five days a week in addition to
three hours a day learning combina-
tions of boxing, kickboxing, judo,
wrestling and jiu-jitsu moves.
The small-framed Larson, who had
never done strength training, even
managed to do 225-pound deadlifts
and 400-pound hip thrusts.
When Danvers spars with Yon-
Rogg, between dialogue quips the
actors do one to two movements
per shot in low light, which is cap-
tured using quick camera pans and
enhanced with incredibly loud sound
effects. The result: It’s hard to follow
the action. At one point, the view
snaps to a wide-angle side shot where
the camera tracks them for three sec-
onds. Unlike the wide-angle side shot
Finn and Captain Phasma did in The
Last Jedi (2017), in Captain Marvel
there’s doubt in their movements and
it winds up looking choppy and slow.other character’s level.
This is most evident in the hyped
scene — which also happens to be
Rodriquez’s favorite — in which
Alita faces a squad of cyberathletic
assassins in an unfriendly game of
motorball in which the whiplash
camerawork is modeled after race-car
films. Watch for Alita’s funny John
Wick nod.CAPTAIN MARVEL
Although the opening 40 minutes of
Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) were
poorly shot with fight scenes akin
to a local martial arts school using
a VHS cam over a weekend, the
film, directed by Anna Boden and
Ryan Fleck, became soaked in Black
Panther (2018) and Wonder Woman
(2017) sensibilities. In short, Captain
Marvel transforms from schlock and
droll to a flamingly funny rock-and-
roll photon blast.
Set in the 1990s, Captain Marvel
concerns an Air Force test pilot
named Carol Danvers, who is flung
into a galactic war involving two alien
enemies: the Kree and the shape-shift-
ing Skrull. When Earth becomes the
final battlefield, Danvers, now part of
an elite Kree fighting force that’s led
by Yon-Rogg, teams up with Nick Fury
(Samuel L. Jackson) to avert dooms-
day by preventing Skrull leader TalosPhoto Courtesy of Marvel Studios
Captain
MarvelAUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2019 § BLACKBELTMAG.COM 33