Martial Arts in the Movies

Wesley Snipes, Bruce Lee, Jean Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal, Jackie Chan, Jet Li. These are just a few of the people that have brought the martial arts to the world through the years via cinemas and televisions. Has this been a good idea or a bad idea.

Well firstly, without films the publicity that martial arts have, would not be near as big as it is today. By seeing these different ways of fighting, people enquire about them, find out where they are taught and start training, so martial art films give this advantage.

Also martial art films and actors are seen as role models for young people and give them motivation to strive to be successful at things. The amount of people that have said that Bruce Lee or Chuck Norris are there heroes can not be counted. People that are not even martial artists have been inspired such actors.

So how about the disadvantages,

Well imagine a young child has just seen a film where the star takes on and beats all his adversaries with high kicks, flying punches and uses back flips to dodge attacks. Inspired by these techniques he practises daily in his room to learn them, thinking that he will be invincible and untouchable. A few weeks later he gets into a confrontation at school, tries to use the techniques used and gets beaten up as he painfully finds out that fights in reality are not like fights in the movies. He then abandons watching martial art films or learning anything to do with martial arts as he thinks they are not worth it.

Martial arts are great for marketing fighting systems, showing feats that can be obtained through practise and motivating people to set, and achieve goals. The techniques used are mostly unrealistic but help for all these reasons and will probably not be altered. The best thing is to not try and replicate these techniques but try and replicate the hard work that these actors have used to get where they are, so as to be successful in your own life.

Marks

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