Movie Weaponry An Artform In Itself
Ever since Dirty Harry unholstered his long-barreled .357 Magnum and urged villains to make his day, exaggerated artillery has played a central role in the appeal of Hollywood action movies.
On film there has been a steady escalation from handguns like the .357 to assault weapons like the Tech-9 to capture the imagination of moviegoers. But this summer, in movies like “Batman and Robin,” “Men in Black” and “The Fifth Element,” the fierce competition among designers has given moviegoers weapons that are truly outlandish.
In “The Fifth Element,” which opens Friday in some locations, Bruce Willis’s double-barreled blunderbuss spouts flames like the petals of a flower, while Gary Oldman’s muscular Zed-F1 weapon is a rocket launcher, machine gun, laser and net thrower all hammered into one. A flashy, almost irresistible red button on one weapon in “The Fifth Element” turns out to be a plot device all by itself.
“You want to do something different from what you’ve seen before,” said Dan Weil, the production designer on the film. “There’s always the fear of looking too much like the weapon from ‘Judge Dredd’ or ‘Alien.’ “
Luc Besson, the director of “The Fifth Element,” hired comic-book artists to flesh out his ideas. “I told my illustrators - they were as young as 19 - this week we’re going to do drawings of guns, and at the end of the week there were 500 guns on the wall,” said Besson, who pulled bits from a number of sketches to create his final arsenal.
He expected the armaments to complement the entire comic-book esthetic of the film, including the far-out costumes designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier. Dan Weil, the production designer, said, however, “What was really important was the relationship with the actor, how it looked in the actor’s hands.”
“Men in Black,” an action comedy starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones as secret government operatives on the trail of aliens and UFOs, also takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to weaponry.
Making light of the notion that bigger is better, Smith’s character whines at one point that the palm-size gun he has been assigned is too small. The joke is that the “noisy cricket,” a chrome-plated weapon that looks like a cross between a squirt gun and a Black & Decker drill, packs a rocket-launcher-size wallop. In another scene, the two agents visit a pawnshop where aliens have stashed a bizarre array of weaponry.
According to the movie, many of the weapons used by the Men in Black have been developed with the aid of alien technology. Among the handier devices is a memory-erasing neuralizer that resembles an overfed Mont Blanc pen.
“When you’re creating a weapon, as with creature design, it can’t be too abstract and esoteric,” said Bo Welch, the production designer for “Men in Black.” “It has to have something familiar or relatable to register.”
To create the weapons’ corny 60s futuristic look, Doug Harlocker, the prop master, and Rick Jimenez, a custom prop maker, pieced together parts from old appliances and motorcycles.
For Barbara Ling, the production designer for “Batman and Robin,” the challenge was to “create weapons that didn’t kill.”
Ling says she was conscious of the potential social impact of her designs because Kenner/Hasbro Toys, which has a licensing deal with Warner Brothers, was involved practically from Day 1. To send a nonviolent message, she said, Batman “should use his brains to trip people up rather than just shoot them.”
Moving beyond such Batman staples as the Batarang, the tools available to the Caped Crusader (George Clooney) will include a hand-held Bat weed whacker, which is useful in defoliating Batman’s latest nemesis, Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman).
Several scenes in the film were rewritten to showcase new weapons, says Ling, whose designs were heavily influenced by Japanese animation and Russian Constructivism.