Batman

Sandy Collora’s Hunter Prey

I have a soft spot for commercial director and filmmaker Sandy Collora‘s short and very professional fan film, Batman: Dead End. And you know I am always excited about indicators that SF filmmaking is becoming more affordable, thus leading to more of every kind of SF film. So I was excited to see this piece on io9.com interviewing Sandy about his new feature-length original film, Hunter Prey. Apparently the film — about “a crew of special forces commandos who must recapture an alien prisoner that has escaped after the military transport ship carrying it crashes on a desolate and hostile planet” — has even attracted the attention of Guillermo Del Toro. So hopefully this will lead to more and bigger things from a director who says that science fiction has the power to make you think about “things like war, politics and current events, by presenting them in situations cinematically from a uniquely different perspective. That’s one of the great things about Science Fiction; You can tell the audience something in a very unique way by using the guise of a futuristic world or society that can reflect our own.”

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Is Batman Possible?

Thanks to David Louis Edelman for pointing me to this article in Scientific American: Dark Knight Shift: Why Batman Could Exist–But Not for Long by E. Paul Zehr, author of the upcoming Becoming Batman: The Possibility of a Superhero.Zehr is an associate professor of kinesiology and neuroscience at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and a 26-year practitioner of Chito-Ryu karate-do, and he knows what he’s talking about. I particular like his response to the question of why he estimates a 15 to 18 year training period for a human being to be able to fight like Batman:

“Batman can’t really afford to lose. Losing means death—or at least not being able to be Batman anymore. But another benchmark is having enough skill and experience to defend himself without killing anyone. Because that’s part of his credo. It would be much easier to fight somebody if you could incapacitate them with extreme force. Punching somebody in the throat could be a lethal blow. That’s pretty easy to do. But if you’re thinking about something that doesn’t result in lethal force, that’s more tricky. It’s really hard for people to get their heads around, I think. To be that good, to not actually lethally injure anyone, requires an extremely high level of skill that would take maybe 15 to 18 years to accumulate.”

He goes on to talk about the “reality-based training” that police officers undergo, because, “It takes years and years and years and years to have the poise to be able to perform when somebody is attacking you for real.”

As interesting as the article are some of the comments, which take issue with his 2 – 3 year period for how long someone could maintain as Batman before they wore down, and another broader debate on whether “fluff” articles like this help or hurt the cause of science.

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