＂Falling＂ is a thriller. Do you dare to play extreme sports in the movie？

Special feature of 1905 film network On November 18th, a movie — — .

The film tells the story of two girls who love extreme sports and challenge to climb an abandoned TV tower more than 600 meters high in the wilderness desert. Because the old escalator falls, they are desperate to survive on a tower platform less than 2 square meters.

In the process of climbing the tower, the protagonist shows a series of thrilling actions of off the charts with difficulty coefficient, such as climbing stairs, climbing ropes and jumping at high altitude. The film not only has action thriller, but also has psychological thriller brought by reversing the plot, which has more frightening effect and is even more frightening.

The production cost of Falling is only $3 million. Since it was released all over the world on August 12th, the global box office has now exceeded $16.8 million, making it a dark horse of the annual thriller with a high degree of discussion.

"Falling" is another extreme sports movie introduced to China mainland after "Climbing with Hands". This genre has always had a considerable audience and has great market potential.

Compared with foreign countries, domestic movies focusing on extreme sports are scarce. When can we have a masterpiece of extreme sports movies?

01

Extreme sports are a combination of some difficult and challenging combined sports, including rock climbing, surfing, parkour, skydiving, bungee jumping, downhill, snowboarding, extreme roller skating, extreme cycling, extreme cross-country, etc., which are all extreme sports, and there are many projects involving multi-dimensional space of sea, land and air.

Extreme sports rose in Europe and the United States in the 1960s, so many films with extreme sports themes were born continuously, including series of classic films.

Classic extreme sports movie "Vertical Limit"

China audiences are also familiar with foreign extreme sports movies. From 2014 to now, almost every year, extreme sports movies have been introduced to the mainland, such as "Extreme Agent 3" in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2019, all of which have a good reputation and box office performance.

Among them, "The Thief" is a film that specializes in gathering a variety of extreme sports scenes, showing winged flight, extreme skiing, freehand rock climbing, high-speed cross-country motorcycle, 70-meter wave surfing and so on. The stuntman and action director in the film are both professional extreme athletes. After the film was released in the mainland, the cumulative box office was nearly 250 million, and the results were outstanding.

Extremist surfer

Extreme sports movies are popular in the award season. For example, 127 Hours, a disaster film focusing on rock climbing exploration, was shortlisted for six awards in the 83rd Academy Awards. Recording "The First Man in the World" Alex Hornod’s "Freehand Rock Climbing" won the Best Documentary in the 91st Academy Awards and the Best Documentary in the 72nd British Film Academy Awards.

Extreme sports have higher professional requirements and are not popular sports. Therefore, the number of films produced is not particularly large, and extreme sports films are not limited to sports films. More extreme sports action scenes are integrated into the narrative framework of disaster films, action films and thrillers.

Because this kind of movies mainly show difficult and dangerous scenes, not only real shooting, but also special effects, virtual shooting and other technologies to enhance the viewing effect and exciting atmosphere, and often win technical awards in visual effects.

02

Compared with foreign countries, there are only a handful of extreme sports movies in China.By 2014Shawn Dou、Michelle Chen、Ashton ChenStarringCity game, is the first action film in China to show extreme sports, focusing on extreme sports such as parkour, winged flight and motorcycle competition.

Although it gained the experience of Hollywood production team, the audience didn’t buy it because of its 3.4-point douban score and 3.15 million box office.

Extreme sports is a good theme for film creation. Extreme sports itself can firmly attract the audience’s attention at the audio-visual level. Difficult challenging tasks provide exciting events for narrative development. Extreme athletes can also dig out the complex aspects of human nature from the psychological level different from ordinary people.

However, extreme sports movies can’t just use the high risk of the project to scare the audience and gain exciting effects. What’s more important is to discuss the significance of realistic adventure, the significance of life and death challenge and the thinking of life value around the story behind this sport.

There are very few extreme sports movies in China, but extreme sports have long been widely integrated into the action design of many action movies and disaster movies. The most famous thing is that almost every of his films will be parkour, which is also widely used for reference by overseas action movies.

The starring actor will also join the action of parkour chasing in the martial arts drama.

The directors focus on the stories of drivers who are engaged in extreme off-road racing and flying cars.

In "Flying Life", Zhang Chi is played, and the realistic prototype is Xu Lang, a good friend of Han Han and known as "the first driver in China". In "Four Seas", A Yao’s action scene of flying over the Pearl River on a motorcycle ignited the climax of the whole film.

, starring in the disaster blockbuster, one of the emotional highlights is set in the scene of climbing in the rain. The father and son face where will you go in extreme climbing and suffer physical and psychological pain.

In the military war film, the members of the Jiaolong Commando parachuted into the destination by using wing-mounted flight and broke into the battlefield. Wing-mounted flight first appeared in the series, which is very impactful and expressive.

In recent years, climbing Mount Everest, as one of the extreme sports, has become a hot topic in domestic movies. From feature films to documentaries, the arduous journey of China climbers to the top of the world is described from different angles, different historical stages and different people, which has won many praises.

Judging from the realistic prototype, there are some winners and losers in the journey of extreme challenges, some people persist and survive, and some people die unfortunately for this.

For example, Xu Kai, the first man in extreme skydiving in China, Wu Yongning, the first man in extreme skydiving in China, Duan Shujun, the first man in bungee jumping in China, and Chen Penbin, the first man in the world to complete the Grand Slam of Extreme Marathon in seven continents, have their unknown brave and inspirational stories, which deserve to be adapted into movies and presented to the audience on the big screen.

Since then, domestic sports films have returned to the mainstream public’s field of vision. With the improvement of China’s film industry technology, it is believed that the creation of extreme sports movies can also usher in a broad space.