Light, Camera, Nanosecond Action

摘要

In the climactic gun battle of John Woo's deliriously nutty identity-switch action film Face/Off, the two enemies―Cage and Travolta―and their sidekicks fire away at each other with Berettas and Glocks; you can see densely detailed plumes of smoke erupt from the muzzles, obscuring the shooters' hands. As bullets emerge from weapons, thousand-foot-per-second velocities slow to a graceful glide, until the spin from the spiral rifling of the gun barrels is clearly visible. It looks like a beautiful bit of computer-generated-image gra-phics―less fancy than the ripple-wake, stop-dead bullet magic in the new Matrix movies, but somehow more real.