IslandHopper wrote:
A flub of sorts takes place during the gun fight between the SWAT Team and the bad guys at the temple. One of the SWAT members fires his M-16 A1 twice (single shot each time) at the bad guys in the temple. It sounded more like a hunting rifle, but was definitely not an M-16.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. An M16
is a hunting rifle, or at least, it can be, it often is, and is one of the best rifles in existence for hunting varmints and predators (in semi-auto-only "AR-15" form of course, due to legalities). It is one of the most accurate semi-automatic rifle designs straight out of the box, and due to its modularity, doing things to improve its already good accuracy such as swapping the barrel, free-floating the barrel, and dropping in a match-grade trigger group, are all easy to do, even for a non-gunsmith. Additionally, it is very ergonomic and its finish and materials of construction make it well-suited to being exposed to the elements and banging about the woods as often happens when hunting.
As far as the sound goes, as a semi-auto, it sounds no different than any other rifle chambered for the same or similar cartridge. However, we don't hear the real sound of any gun being fired on this show, nor any other TV show or movie that I know of. In reality they are firing blanks, but we don't even hear the real sound of the blanks (because they sound pathetic), we hear sound effects that are dubbed in during post-production. This is why Magnum's "forty-five" has a deeper sound than the bad guys' handguns (which are usually .32s, 9mms, or .38s); it is done intentionally by the Foley artist to give the impression that the "forty-five" is more powerful. They did the same thing in countless other shows and movies (probably using the exact sound effects), such as Dirty Harry (his .44 Magnum got the deep sound effect) and Stallone's Cobra (his "forty-five" [which was actually a 9mm, the same as Magnum's prop "forty-five" was a 9mm in reality] got the deep sound effect).
The Foley artist did make a bit of a gaffe when he chose the sound effect for the M16 in the scene you mentioned (but only relative to how things were typically done by other Foley artists) in that he gave the M16 the deeper, more booming sound effect that was normally used for shotguns and higher-power rifles. The reason I say
"only relative to how things were typically done by other Foley artists" is because all of the gunshot sound effects in pretty much any TV show or movie are wildly inaccurate relative to how an audio recording of a real gunshot sounds (countless examples of which can be found on YouTube). If they actually did use unaltered recordings of real gunshots, they would run into the
Reality Is Unrealistic problem (see also:
Bang, Bang, BANG), because
real gunshots sound pathetic on an audio recording, and people would think it sounded fake because they are so used to hearing the "improved" TV and movie Foleys (see:
The Coconut Effect).