What makes a battle scene cool / great?

[akma]

I've began thinking about this subject in the last few days, and how could I write cool battles in stories.

I tried to distill this into a few factors:
A) Background - the events that lead to the battle, the hype that gets built around it, why do they fight.
B) The abilities and skills each side employs, the ways they use them, the interplay of varied attacks/defenses/counter-attacks.
C) Interaction with the terrain and environment, maybe also things that will happen at the same time as the battle and interfere with it.
D) Meaningful consequences no matter how the fight turns out.

I'm curious to see how others will view this subject, what are your opinions? What makes a battle great or awful?

[Sapphire Guard]

The answer to all of your questions is nearly always 'it depends'.

What kind of action scene are we talking about? A superhero fight is different from a Wild West shootout, which is different from a sniper duel.

[Magic_Hat]

Off the top of my head...

-Brevity: don't have it go on longer than it needs to. Basically who wins and maybe how they do it is important. For pacing it might be okay to drag it out a little, but don't bore the audience by making it too long. Case and point: the lightsaber fight at the end of A New Hope is a millions times better than the fight between the same characters in Revenge of the Sith.
-Tension: we have to actually believe the hero/protagonist is in danger. If they're just a super hero video game characters than there's nothing interesting in it. Make me believe there's something that could be lost - the story needs to be two steps ahead of the audience, and not the audience two steps ahead of the story.
-Grit: this goes slightly back to tension but we need to see the dirt, disgusting aspects of the fight. It adds some realism and hence relatability to the scene. The characters start at full power, then they get slower over the course of the fight. It makes the battle more interesting and memorable.

[Mordar]

The answer to all of your questions is nearly always 'it depends'.

What kind of action scene are we talking about? A superhero fight is different from a Wild West shootout, which is different from a sniper duel.

I'm not sure I agree...I think that all (or almost all) battle scenes should feature the following elements:

Investment in the participants - we have to care about the people fighting, which can include rooting for one side or the other, but could also include sympathy for both.
Advancement of the story - there needs to be a reason for the battle beyond fightporn. Fightporn has its place, but it will never be the justification for a "great" battle.
Scale that fits with the rest of the story - if we are really focused on one or two characters, the battle (even if it is large scale) has to feel personal. Focusing on the brilliant tactics of the general isn't valuable if the story is about the peasant conscript spearman.
Consequences - already mentioned by the OP.
Necessary emotive response - Not sure how to describe this, exactly, and that's why it is last on my list. The presentation of the battle (and probably the outcome) needs to be managed in a way that fosters the emotive response it is to serve in the story. If it is to show the terror and horror of war, it needs to do that in a personal way. If it is to show the balance of power, make sure both sides suffer. If it is to uplift the audience, provide the lift.


Sure, the implementation will vary a lot depending on the situation/genre/theme...but I think for a battle to be "great" it needs to include these elements every time.

That being said, there can also be a lot of value to "awful" or at least not-great battles.

- M

[Telonius]

I'd say that dialogue is a wild card. Not necessary for an awesome scene, but awesome banter can make or break it. Obi-Wan versus Darth Vader in "New Hope" has already been mentioned. I'd argue that the dialogue there is as important as the actual fight, if not more. Westley versus Inigo Montoya wouldn't have been nearly as awesome minus the banter. But dialogue isn't absolutely necessary to a battle scene. I can think of two or three off the top of my head from The Matrix that were amazing without a single word being spoken.

[druid91]

Off the top of my head...

-Brevity: don't have it go on longer than it needs to. Basically who wins and maybe how they do it is important. For pacing it might be okay to drag it out a little, but don't bore the audience by making it too long. Case and point: the lightsaber fight at the end of A New Hope is a millions times better than the fight between the same characters in Revenge of the Sith.

This one I disagree with. I honestly didn't consider the lightsaber fight in a new hope a fight scene at all.

While the fight scene in revenge of the sith had it's awkward moments and moved far too much and unnaturally it at the very least was an actual fight rather than a standoff.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

If you haven't already, check the extras for the Lord of the Rings films - especially the Two Towers segment dedicated to the Battle of Helm's Deep.

Jackson himself credits most of his decisions on the film Zulu, so you probably want to check that out as well.

ETA: also, looking at the answer above, I might have misunderstood what you mean by "Battle". I would not consider 1-on-1 fights a battle scene.

Grey Wolf

[Fyraltari]

Being clear is a must. There are few things more boring than a fight scene where your reader/audience can't tell who is where doing what to whom. In large scale battles, the different parts of the battlefield must be clearly recognizable. If it's a film, long takes are harder but always look gorgeous.

[Tvtyrant]

Basically does the fight resolve a character conflict. The best battle in any book IMO is The Battle of Five Armies in the Hobbit book. The two protagonists make fundamental choices, the Dwarf King comes out to save his allies and kin and Bilbo decides to fight (culminating a book long arc about abandoning being a coward.)

The battle ends when Bilbo gets knocked out because all of the relevant character development is done and without it the battle has no meaning.

The movie makes the best written battle the worst battle. The dwarves leaving the castle is rendered less desperate, Bilbo's choice is treated as less heroic, and the battle is fsr too long and unfocused. It draws attention away from the character development.

Wheel of Time's final battle felt like the movie Battle of Five Armies to me. The big choice was made in the previous book, so the final battle is a bloody falling action instead of the climax.

[Olinser]

At its core it is a question of engagement. You have to be engaged and care about both the participants in the battle, and the outcome of the battle.

When they have set the stage properly and you care about the participants, what makes a battle scene great is a combination of impact and 'fair play'.

Impact is there has to be meaningful consequences for whoever wins the battle. The actual scale of the consequence doesn't matter, but it matters relative to the participants. You can have a great battle scene where people are fighting over a farm, if its the farmer trying to protect his family and livelihood, for instance, but if your scale is 2 armies clashing over the future of a country, a battle over a farm is unlikely to have real impact.

Then 'fair play' is taken from the detective term - where all information and abilities are reasonably available and communicated to you, the observer, so that you can reasonably map out how the battle goes beforehand.

You can have outmatched battles where the underdog has to figure out a way to win, but doing crap like having the bad guy win and have the protagonist at their mercy, and then suddenly the protagonist announces that actually they poisoned the evil guy's lunch totally off-panel and he dies right there is ridiculous. Or having the protagonist suddenly pull out never-mentioned or hinted at powers and suddenly stand up and win the fight. If you show them trying to master a difficult technique and failing, but then being able to perform it when its life or death that's acceptable, but him suddenly announcing 'oh yeah off-screen last night I traveled to the ancient lost city and picked up the sacred legendary weapon of Ploto Koupon', and then winning the fight, completely destroys any engagement in the fight.

[Velaryon]

Being clear is a must. There are few things more boring than a fight scene where your reader/audience can't tell who is where doing what to whom. In large scale battles, the different parts of the battlefield must be clearly recognizable. If it's a film, long takes are harder but always look gorgeous.

I agree with this, which is why I think shaky cam is the worst thing to happen to action movies in my lifetime.

[Dienekes]

Alright, my perspective.

A fight scene is first and foremost just a "scene." A scene must be relevant to the story, but more than that a scene must have a smaller story all on its own. The best scenes have excellent cinematography, beautiful images, and interesting and dynamic characters to propel the narrative of that scene.

A fight scene is no different. Making the images shown cinematic and fitting with the style you want to portray in the scene.

Take shaky-cam. A lot of people dislike shaky-cam (myself included) but it can serve a purpose in a fight scene, or any action scene. A shaky-cam will make the scene seem confused and jerky. It will make the viewer unsure what is going on. This can be incredibly effective at showing that the protagonist of the action scene is unsure, or concussed, or completely lost in the pure chaos of a giant battle. It must match the protagonists experience, and put the viewer in his shoes. If getting into the absolute chaos of the battle is what the scene is about.

If the scene is instead about watching these two badasses fight each other. It has no place there. The cinematography must match the tone of the scene and the emotions you are trying to portray.

Next up, the story of the scene. A good scene goes through a change. If nothing changes that nothing was gained to the narrative and the scene was pointless. Action scenes are no different. Sure there's always a little change in an action scene: one character that wasn't beat up before is now beat up. But that by itself with no further context is a pretty hollow and unimportant change. Get us emotionally invested in whether or not both these characters get beat up, and you have a start. Have the process of them getting beaten up add something vitally important to the overarching narrative of the story and you have something great.

A fight scene has a similar flow to any other story. A beginning that introduces the combatants, the goal of the fight, and all the little details that will be important later in the fight. A moment where the hero is at his weakest, where the tension is built up to truly show the gravity of the situation. Then the moment of change or climax, revealing how those little details you laid out in the beginning of the fight are now relevant to the success of whoever wins. Then the denouement, where the fight is basically over and the loser gets mopped up. Now I should note, some great fight scenes can mess about with this pattern. They could have a secondary reveal that negates the first and end in the protagonists loss. With enough build up and stakes you can even have a great fight that is solely a curb stomp victory. Though it's usually best if this isn't the finale big fight of the story. Works great for setting up antagonists though. Or gag fights. You can even have the climax not even be about the violence. Having one character reveal information that causes the emotional climax of the fight so the winner is still somehow the loser can work great.

Then we go into the actual fighting. Every character should have, well, a character when they fight. Their actions are important every little one of them. Seeing how different characters move and think and react differently in a fight is one of the hallmarks of turning a good fight scene into a great fight scene.

One thing I'd mention for writing fight scenes as opposed to watching them. Writing a fight scene probably should not get bogged down with all the nitty little details. Now, I can watch Bruce Lee fights without context over and over because he is fun to watch. But if I would read a transcript of every single punch and kick Bruce used, even if a brilliant wordsmith went over it. I'd probably fall asleep midway through the first fight.

One thing I would note, is that length of a fight scene is tricky. Now I've watched movies or read books that are basically all about just one siege or one battle. And it's almost entirely fight scene. The trick here is, that it's not all one continuous fight. That would get dull. For these long drawn out battles there needs to be a structure like any other story. It's just that this structure is propelled through fight scenes. And any breaks between must be really used to the best of the writers capabilities.

The worst example of this kind of fight scene I can think of is Revenge of the Sith. It is constantly changing locations, but no real revelations or interesting developments. Most of the changes themselves seem random. Until the high ground moment. Where there is some dramatic reveal, but by that point I checked out 10 minutes ago.

[Telonius]

Impact is there has to be meaningful consequences for whoever wins the battle. The actual scale of the consequence doesn't matter, but it matters relative to the participants. You can have a great battle scene where people are fighting over a farm, if its the farmer trying to protect his family and livelihood, for instance, but if your scale is 2 armies clashing over the future of a country, a battle over a farm is unlikely to have real impact.


Google "Wilmer McLean." :smallbiggrin:

Seriously though, in general I agree. It just all comes down to presentation. If you can make it work, it will work; but small scale can make it harder.

[JeenLeen]

I think it can make a big difference depending on the medium.

For a book, I find almost any battle scene dreadfully boring. I an enjoy cool tactical moves, like a character showing off a new power or a neat strategy, but any drawn-out scenes bore me really quick. I can get its well-written, but I just glaze over and read the words getting the gist of it. Sometimes so poorly I miss a key element of the plot if it's revealed in a battle.

For example, when they started shooting canons through small portals
Or when the members of that cursed "murder-rampage every night, and anyone who dies joins" town attack.


While, in a movie, I can enjoy a cool and longish fight scene (even if in general I like less-actiony stuff.)

I think a lot of that is a quirk of my personal taste, but my perhaps-extreme example might show a general thing that a good battle in a book could differ from a good battle in a movie.
EDIT: I realize now that, 2 posts above, someone made a similar point more eloquently.

[akma]

The answer to all of your questions is nearly always 'it depends'.

What kind of action scene are we talking about?

I'm actually trying to look at it in an abstract way. I'm not sure what I'll do with perfect answers to this question, as the stories I end up writing are usually not the type that would benefit from having great fight scenes - my characters are rarely skilled combatants and when a fight does happen, it tends to be one sided, unfair, very quick and very lethal. Scenes like that could be great, but I can hardly call them great fight scenes.

But I am currently developing a story with a character that successfully fights monsters (but supposed to have an unepic vibe), and have more inspiration in the direction of superheroes lately (I blame the web serial Worm).



ETA: also, looking at the answer above, I might have misunderstood what you mean by "Battle". I would not consider 1-on-1 fights a battle scene.


I have been thinking more about small scale fights, but not only about them. I guess large scale fights would be harder to write as there will be more relevant details and happenings, and I would still need to not drown the reader in details.



...but him suddenly announcing 'oh yeah off-screen last night I traveled to the ancient lost city and picked up the sacred legendary weapon of Ploto Koupon', and then winning the fight, completely destroys any engagement in the fight.

It seems like it something that could be easily parodied. You'll have the protagonist pull out the "invincible sword of ultimate destruction", ramble for 5 minutes about how he got this sword and how powerful it is, maybe even its great power was talked about throughout the story, then the villain breaks the sword and kills the hero in 2 seconds.

Something I thought about and failed to mention is sophistication. That the fight won't just be the most simple moves every time, but varied and smart interplay of move-counter move, with each side using it's abilities intelligently. But I guess sometimes it can be bad, if for example the characters are supposed to be bad at this.

I think that after a few more replies I will do a shortened list of the points gathered here by various posters (including me) for reference (both for myself and future viewers of this post).

[Knaight]

I tend to favor clear action done by people who can fight well enough to portray it convincingly under the handling of good fight choreographers - but all of that is secondary. Primary is the phenomenon where any fight scene in a script as [fight scene happens] is probably garbage. They should be part of the whole work, which means that how they happen matters. If the plot is written with them as glorified intermissions then there's really no room for that, and that ruins a fight scene like nothing else.

[Sahe]

There is quite a bit that goes into an action scene.

and I highly recommend Patrick H. Willem's "Blue Flame Special" video series. It's on Action Scenes and why and how they work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrwdBw4Gnuk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8czFGUedDJU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfGVOTSlakw

[Telwar]

It depends, and I'm pretty sure I have some odd opinions, but things that make me like battle/fight scenes are:


Combatants acting to the best of their knowledge: That is, to say, not holding an idiot ball. They can act on their knowledge, and it's okay if it's wrong or if their knowledge is incomplete. My favorite example is, no lie, this episode of Inuyasha (https://inuyasha.fandom.com/wiki/Episode_122), where Bankotsu takes the fairly obvious opportunity for a power-up, without realizing it will specifically make him *more* vulnerable.

World-building in the battle: The fight should tell you more about the world. The fleet action in Land of the Dead (http://www.throneworld.com/wiki/index.php?title=SS:LOD), where the Imperial Mexica fleet is ambushed around an Old One site, even as the IMN are being overrun, tells you about how space naval combat works in the setting, from the layers of sensors to how the Imperial crews keep order to network-centric warfare and their planning for defeat. (I'm a little bitter, the fourth book has been coming for 10 years now...)

Hope, Un-looked For: Okay, I'm a sucker for the cavalry coming over the hill. And you think I'm going to talk about The Ride of the Rohirrim and the Battle of the Pelennor Fields (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pis3veqKl8k) (...and I really do like that), but really it's the Pegasus rescuing Galactica in Exodus Part 2 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbB58X21jxY), particularly the shot pulling out where you see the railgun rounds coming in on the BaseStars*. And, yes, I really liked it back in the day when a face wrestler ("wrassler") would have someone come out when they were being unfairly tag-teammed.


* - Interestingly, I can date the demise of my first WoW raid team to the episode premiere date, because we wound up running a smaller instance and one of our friends was live-blogging it over voice, to the consternation of our tank, who had not caught up yet. "Oh, wow, they jumped the Galactica into the atmosphere!" 'NOOOOOOOOO STOP TALKING PLEASE!!!!!!"

[No brains]

Musical score. Most of the fight scenes/ battles that stuck with me were accompanied by some kick-ass music.

Burly Brawl in Matrix Revolutions let me in on the 'joke' that what Agent Smith was doing was weird and over-the top even for the setting.

I can hear the boiling hatred in the score of Wrath of Khan as well as the thrill and release of escaping death.

Jeremy Soule.

There's a bunch of other examples and factors, but excellent music ties together the emotions and the actions of battle.

I know this doesn't exactly work in a few forms of media, but I think it is a vital element to audio/visual productions.

[Yora]

I'm generally not much of a fan of action scenes, and I easily get very bored by big battle scenes.

For a fight scene to work, it has to tell a story. You have to see the fighters respond to each others actions and at least the heroes coming up with plans to outsmart their enemies, or some kind of narrative in which the protagonists learn something or the antagonists show their capabilities. A fight scene has to tell us something.

Which is why Attack of the Clones and Battle of the Five Armies are terrible movies. They are just a big pile of random shoting and hacking that gones on forever without story progress.

[factotum]

Being clear is a must. There are few things more boring than a fight scene where your reader/audience can't tell who is where doing what to whom.

Yeah, this. Can't stand the sort of super-fast-cut "WTF is going on?" battle you see in bad movies.

[BeerMug Paladin]

I'll note that a few people have already mentioned many aspects that I'll agree with, so I'll skip over those for now and mention something that I feel deserves to be highlighted.

Show the participants attempt things that does not end up with them winning. The fight will ultimately end because of some final maneuver. But before that final thing resolves the fight, show a couple of things being tried that conceivably might work which do not work because of whatever reason. Don't go overboard with it, because that will just make it drag on too long. Two or three things is probably preferable, because it can effectively raise the stakes without dragging it on for too long.

Beyond that, I'll agree that great fights tend to be those that advance the plot in some way. Having something important to the story happen during the fight makes it more memorable. Not every fight needs to advance the plot, but having a fight that doesn't advance the wider plot in some way will probably rarely ever be considered great.

It also might be worthwhile to dissect particular fight scenes you believe were done well and then try to answer for yourself why that fight is so good. One fight I think is particularly interesting is Roy vs Frost Giants. The fight seems to primarily have been scripted so Roy's sword will be dropped. So that happens during the fight, right after he turns a 2 on 1 fight into a 1 on 1 fight. But neither of these things are really attempts by a character to resolve the fight in their favor. They're just things that happen to occur during the battle.

Here's what the combatants actually do to try and win. During the fight, Roy tries to talk the giants down from conflict. Then the giant tries to complete their goal instead of fighting Roy directly. Then Elan and Roy work together to redirect the giant's focus back on them. None of these things end up resolving the fight, they're just ensuring the stakes are clear and trying to make you believe both sides are trying to accomplish a victory by the best means they have available to them.

The thing that actually ends the fight is ancillary characters providing aid. IE, the community of people that have been doing things in the background during the fight which seemingly were unimportant for the actual outcome. Funny that's the resolution, isn't it? Probably not an accident it's in the Durkon-heavy, community oriented book arc...


Obi-Wan versus Darth Vader in "New Hope" has already been mentioned.
I don't understand this. That is all.

[Jay R]

One crucial aspect is the ability to follow the action. The difference between great screen swordfights and poor ones is whether you can tell what's going on.

Bernard Cornwell writes some of the best battle scenes I've ever read. He actually goes to the battlefield and walks over it before he writes the battle scene, and he describes the action well enough that I can follow the course of many long Napoleonic battles -- even Waterloo.

[Sapphire Guard]

Okay, I'll try this.

Like I said, it depends. The climax of the Good, Bad, and the Ugly is mostly composed of staring, and it's a great action scene. Everything hinges on what the goals of the scene are, that will decide everything else needed. But if I had to boil it down, I'd say something like this.

Can we understand what's happening (unless the scene is meant to be confusing or opaque)

Are the participants in character (and if they're not, is there a reason why not?)

Do we care about the result (and if not, why not?)

Edit: Oh, and two different action scenes shouldn't be the same (unless you know why)

[Ramza00]

Good action scenes often have horror directors, for learning how to do horror helps you as a director translate these skills to other genres such as action and comedy.

Why is this? Well a scene can be subdivided into smaller parts which is "sequence" and "beat", and with a beat there are so many going on that you can't list them off the top of your head all the things happening for they are so small but they add up to something that is "more than the sums of the parts" or "less than the sum of the parts" with the parts being the individual beats.

So mixing things like music, timing, what you show the audience plus when and where you show the audience communicates motion and flow to the viewer. This is the most important in the horror genre, but practicing the hardest form translates into good action scenes.

----

Patrick (H) Willems has a great youtube account with several videos on this subject. Since there are so many videos I am just going to link to his account.

https://www.youtube.com/user/patrickhwillems/videos

And then I will pull out a video on this subject that makes the same points I am making. In this below video Patrick goes into why Stephen Spielberg has so many famous scenes / set pieces / actions scenes, with a hyperfocus on the Jurassic Park T-Rex scene, and how Spielberg learned his craft via some of his first movies being horror movies. Also the video starts off by explaining set pieces aka those really memorable action scenes I think prompted this thread. :smallsmile:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWqyNE6ok14

[Kymme]

When I care about the participants.

[Devonix]

A good fight scene must be about more than just the fight. It should tell us about the characters, their personalities, their goals.

[Yora]

Okay, I'll try this.

Like I said, it depends. The climax of the Good, Bad, and the Ugly is mostly composed of staring, and it's a great action scene. Everything hinges on what the goals of the scene are, that will decide everything else needed. But if I had to boil it down, I'd say something like this.

The final duel in Once Upon A Time In The West is ridiculous on paper. I think the whole thing is 10 minutes with just a single line of dialog before a shot is fired.

[Frozen_Feet]

Let me share one thing which greatly influences how you view battles:

Actual experience with martial arts, including firearms, military etc.

If a well-coreographed fight, this will trigger "Oh, I know that technique!" response and add to the depth of the scene. You can get to the mindset of the characters better when you see what they're trying to do.

In a badly coreographed fight it will just make you go "Oh god whyyyyy?" and immediately take you out of the scene because it's such BS.

[Aedilred]

I basically agree with Mordar, although I should note that those are the factors which in my mind tip an already good fight scene over into being memorable and "great". The camerawork and choreography still needs to be on point. Shaky-cam can work, but only in small doses and in certain kinds of film. It is hopelessly overused. So too is its close cousin, the rapid cut, a favourite of Michael Bay. The audience needs to be able to see what's going on.

It's also worth noting that, while battle scenes tend to work best where you care about the characters beforehand, a really good one can draw you in and make you care even if we're meeting the characters for the first time at its outset. Saving Private Ryan is a good example here, as is its near-contemporary Gladiator. Both of them drag us through the mud and the blood with the characters. Gladiator in fact is replete with great battle sequences and there are at least two others I could name as all-time great scenes but I remember in particular the way that opening affected me the first time I saw it.

For scenes that come towards the end of films, I would mention the Battle of New York in Avengers as an example of impressive battle cinematography. Although it does eventually go on a bit long, to juggle that many characters without losing focus is hard, and is made to look easy. There's also that long tracking shot which is just showing off.

And of course the charge of the Rohirrim in The Return of the King. The Battle of Helm's Deep is also excellent but that sequence in the final film always gets me going: almost everything about it is so well-selected that in some ways it does its job too well: it's such an effective climax that the remainder of the battle sequences in the film fall a bit flat.

Frozen_Feet makes a good point about "realism" to the extent where it needs to have enough verisimilitude that at least you suspend your disbelief and ignore the unrealistic elements. Even a basic nod towards tactical considerations is worthwhile: too many battle scenes have both sides just run at each other and hack about mindlessly. On the other hand, you don't want to get so bogged down in tactics that the scene becomes an academic exercise and loses excitement. See for example Alexander as an example of how to screw this up.

[Sapphire Guard]

I'd treat 'realism' with a certain amount of caution. Any fight lasting longer than ten seconds is probably unrealistic.

Realistic= no one talks, but that takes away from the spectacle. It's a balance.


The final duel in Once Upon A Time In The West is ridiculous on paper. I think the whole thing is 10 minutes with just a single line of dialog before a shot is fired.


Do you mean the start, where they're waiting for the train?

[Aedilred]

I'd treat 'realism' with a certain amount of caution. Any fight lasting longer than ten seconds is probably unrealistic.

Realistic= no one talks, but that takes away from the spectacle. It's a balance.

Although the thread hasn't really gone into it, I think we should probably draw a distinction between "fight scenes", generally between couple of individuals or small groups, and which as you say are probably drawn out longer than is wholly realistic, and "battle scenes" which are between armies or at least large groups, and which if anything are probably condensed compared to what would be realistic.

For the purposes of the thread I have mostly been considering the latter, although the former have come up.

[Fyraltari]

Let me share one thing which greatly influences how you view battles:

Actual experience with martial arts, including firearms, military etc.

If a well-coreographed fight, this will trigger "Oh, I know that technique!" response and add to the depth of the scene. You can get to the mindset of the characters better when you see what they're trying to do.

In a badly coreographed fight it will just make you go "Oh god whyyyyy?" and immediately take you out of the scene because it's such BS.

While that's not necessarily a bad point, I think it is, partially, unfair.

Writers, directors, actors, etc went to writing/directing/acting schools and studied writing/directing/acting. Almost by definition thet cannot have the level of expertise of professionals of any other given fields.

To drift away from fighting for a moment: biologists probably cannot watch a monster movie without listing all the dumb things that shouldn't happen and the same goes for law professionals and policemen and police procedurals. The same however does not apply to biologists watching police procedurals or law professionals watching monster movies.

As soon as someone makes a movie or a book, unless it is based exclusively on personal experience, they will get something wrong. The goal of a movie/book is not to give a perfect picture of how things work, it is to give a story that is compelling to the greatest possible number of people. Visually/narratively interesting trumps correct. Becasue most people, like the author, are not experts in that particular field, their threshold on the ratio intersesting/correct is much lower than the few experts in the audience.

Of course this has to be nuanced, what is correct can make for better stories, if a detail is an important plot point it should be researched, big productions can afford to hire consultants and choregraphers and highly paid actors can be trained. And of course, if expertise or grounding in reality is a selling point of the movie, well, they should lay in the beds they made (we are more justified in criticizing the physics of Gravity than those of A New Hope I mean).

[BeerMug Paladin]

To drift away from fighting for a moment: biologists probably cannot watch a monster movie without listing all the dumb things that shouldn't happen and the same goes for law professionals and policemen and police procedurals. The same however does not apply to biologists watching police procedurals or law professionals watching monster movies.

As soon as someone makes a movie or a book, unless it is based exclusively on personal experience, they will get something wrong. The goal of a movie/book is not to give a perfect picture of how things work, it is to give a story that is compelling to the greatest possible number of people. Visually/narratively interesting trumps correct. Becasue most people, like the author, are not experts in that particular field, their threshold on the ratio intersesting/correct is much lower than the few experts in the audience.

Of course this has to be nuanced, what is correct can make for better stories, if a detail is an important plot point it should be researched, big productions can afford to hire consultants and choregraphers and highly paid actors can be trained.

I think this bears keeping in mind. The facts about the world exist to serve the story. Portray enough detail to convince the average person everything fits together. You won't fool the experts of the relevant information in mundane reality, but most people reading the story probably aren't experts in the right topics to catch the errors that are bound to exist.


(we are more justified in criticizing the physics of Gravity than those of A New Hope I mean).
I'm pretty certain Gravity is a dramatic piece set in space just as much as A New Hope is. I don't really view them any differently in terms of presentation. Gravity was just more engaging.

It has been a while since I've seen it, but I recall that I had a hard time believing that the main characters were actually scientists of any sort, let alone astronauts. That kind of led me to take it as a drama first and a science fiction movie secondly. I honestly can't recall what gave me that impression, but it's what I was left with.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

I'm going to keep these real broad, and repeat a lot of what other people said. But I think the best fighting sequences incorporate, on top of the basics, these two elements:

Story. This does not end at the scene having a reason to exist and an outcome with an effect on the rest of the movie. The best action scenes have story elements woven into them. A good example is the fight between Jack and Will in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. It establishes, among other things: That Will and Jack are roughly equal in terms of how well they fight, but Will is more technically skilled while Jack is better and more willing at playing dirty, that Jack has a pistol with just one bullet for a very specific reason, "this bullet is not for you", and on the side it shows that Will's boss is a lazy bum who sleeps all the time, so Will must be the hardworking skilled craftsman who made the business a succes. You don't need to tell a lot of story in an action scene, "see, this is the character you will be rooting for because he's soooo awesome" is often enough, but it's easier to have too little story than too much.

Choreography. Action sequences consisting of pro-wrestlers and stuntmen flailing about in quick cuts edited together by people who know what they're doing can be quite entertaining. The moves look real enough, and anything weird has been left out. But these sequences become even better when you can tell what's going on. This is why it pays to have action stars who studied martial arts, so they can convincingly act out longer sequences in order, and why you want someone in charge of these scenes, writing them. If you watch Tony Jaa in ong Bak you might get annoyed by all the repeats from different angles at some point, but you can tell where characters are, you can reconstruct what kind of path they took trough the room. The fight becomes a thing that could have existed. And that gives the fight a storyline in and of itself. If I just see quick cuts with random punches any one punch can be the last one, there's no buildup. When a guy gets driven into a corner, gets pummeled, ducks away, hides in the crowd, gets called out and then bursts out of the mass of spectators to start a massive comeback, that gets the viewer involved. And you can't really tell that story if the version of the fight that appears in the final film does not follow some sort of choreography or plan.

[kiranyadav]

I've began thinking about this subject in the last few days, and how could I write cool battles in stories.

I tried to distill this into a few factors:
A) Background - the events that lead to the battle, the hype that gets built around it, why do they fight.
B) The abilities and skills each side employs, the ways they use them, the interplay of varied attacks/defenses/counter-attacks.
C) Interaction with the terrain and environment, maybe also things that will happen at the same time as the battle and interfere with it.
D) Meaningful consequences no matter how the fight turns out.

I'm curious to see how others will view this subject, what are your opinions? What makes a battle great or awful?

Battle Scene of History are great because they are related with us and our life is impact by these battle scene.