Extra Special Features

Special features on DVDs are generally lame. They either include a commentary that nobody will ever watch or deleted scenes that suck (hence the decision to delete them).

But I gotta say, I love special features on mega budget action flicks. They always include at least one segment on how they did that badass fight scene or how they built some ridiculously expensive thing for the film.

For me, this little fascination started with the second Matrix movie. They made a one mile freeway in the middle of nowhere for a top-notch car chase. Think about that for a minute. They built a road, worth probably hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more, for one scene in one movie. Amazing.

Then Batman Begins came out and I annoyed Leah to death talking about how they actually made the Batmobile. The director first crafted it out of clay and then they got people to construct a model and then they got engineers to BUILD IT! The scene where the Batmobile drives through a concrete wall, well that is an actual Batmobile driving through an actual concrete wall! How cool is that. They built three of the custom made cars for the movie.

Recently I watched three hours of Iron Man special features, which showed how they built a real suit for Robert Downey Jr. to wear. Unlike the Matrix where they built a real road or Batman Begins where they built a real car, the suit doesn’t actually fly or anything. The engineering genius is that they took a comic book creation and made it realistic. They had to figure out how the metal joints would come together and move. How to make it light enough for a man to walk around in, How to shoot flames from the hands. It wasn’t plastic or Styrofoam, it was a real suit made of molded metal.

And while this is probably a little less obvious, I was equally fascinated by watching the special features on Hellboy II. Come on, all of you saw Hellboy II. Who doesn’t like a movie called Hellboy? To cut straight to the point, the makers of the film didn’t really create a demon who works for the U.S. government or a really smart fish dude, instead they built the Trolls’ Market, a make believe street with so much detail that the designers are either incredibly devoted to their work, or have way too much money and time on their hands. The Trolls Market included a sandal maker, who had dozens of sizes of wooden sandals on hand for trolls tiny and giant. It included a bone grinder because apparently some trolls dine on human bones. It included a map shop where everything in it was map related, down to the door handle, which was a map of the high seas.

These mega budget action movies generally rely on some new world or alternate reality and I guess I just think it is marvelous that people would expend such effort to make us believe that it is all really possible.