I practiced stage combat years ago. I know how to choreograph a decent fight. I love watching skilled practitioners strut their stuff. This is why I love watching old Jackie Chan movies and the John Wick series, why I marvel at Olympic gymnasts or any other athletes where I have some basic understanding of just how utterly awesome these people are at what they do. I appreciate skill, and I admire craft.

Making a big blockbuster action sequence takes a lot of work, and can be done well. Sometimes I like that style. The first time I watched the first Avengers movie, I don’t think I was aware that the climactic fight took over twenty minutes. I enjoyed the spectacle, appreciated the work put into it, and didn’t care about how long it ran.

But many of those climactic fights feel like filler. Maybe I’ve seen too many Marvel movies, consumed them past the point of satiation. Or maybe… 

…those climactic fight scenes don’t offer much except excitement—or a chance to see a cool character do a cool thing. Maybe blockbuster movies (not just Marvel films) often lose sight of what makes good fight scenes good.

It’s too bad—those climactic fight scenes aren’t all filler. But whenever I think I’m seeing filler, I check out. I’m not invested. The climax is the worst time for that to happen, too. Worse, if that filler runs too long I stop feeling connected to the story. It barely matters how skilled the performers and CGI artists are at that point; the scene (and the story) feels vacuous.

So. I do appreciate technique. But if I’m watching a fight scene for the fight scene’s sake, I want it to be really damn good. Most media doesn’t meet this bar for me.

If I’m watching a fight for something other than the scene itself, I need to feel invested. I want the stakes to be immediately understandable. I want whatever people are doing to directly impact those stakes. The more grounded, the better. If the fight scene isn’t the most important thing happening, I don’t need to see all of it—cut away from the action and show me what’s important! What tension does this fight create elsewhere? What else is at stake? What can I be emotionally connected to?

Tomorrow Never Dies understood the importance of cutting away from the action. The whole pre-opening sequence action scene is a textbook example of how to raise stakes while cutting away from a fight (try this, but if that’s taken down you’re looking for a 9m 12s video of the intro or opening scene). If we hadn’t seen Bond’s handlers, including Dame Judi Dench’s M, all sweating bullets and feeling anguish at the presumed death of Bond, that sequence would be exciting but ho hum. Instead, I love it. If you want other examples of clear stakes, Bond films are shockingly good at establishing clear stakes and escalating them in action scenes—though they often fail to feel grounded or create emotional investment.

That brings me to Accented Cinema’s excellent How to Structure a Fight Scene. It’s only eleven and a half minutes. Go enjoy it.

The writing structure Accented Cinema presents there, with “set, rise, twist, and tie,” is an extremely useful tool for writing and planning fight scenes as well as for analyzing them. Moreover, Accented Cinema highlights the emotional connection involved in a good fight scene. Give us a reason to care beyond “does the protagonist win.” Give us personal investment in the emotions and personal journeys of the characters involved. Use the fight scene to directly impact those personal journeys. A well-written fight scene can serve as a crucible, transforming the characters within it and around it.

It can do other things too.

Villeneuve’s Dune (yep, I’m gushing about it again) does something really neat. In one extremely concise scene it encapsulates the whole larger struggle, mimicking its structure and showing us the larger picture writ small. This sequence is less a fight scene than poetic summary. It’s extremely fast too.

Just after 1h 21m into the film, the Atreides troops are holding a stairway against attacking Harkonnen. There’s a brief pause when you can see how the fight is going as the Emperor’s Sardaukar drop in behind the Atreides. The House Atreides troops are clearly outnumbered. But in that moment, it looks like they’re giving far better than they’re getting. When I pause, I can see many bulbous, insectile Harkonnen figures lying on the ground at their feet—and in those few frames, I can’t be sure that I see any Atreides down at all. The Atreides soldiers might still lose simply by being hideously outnumbered and eventually worn down, but they are skilled, disciplined, and loyal. Then, they are backstabbed.

The entirety of this fight, including opening shots of the Harkonnen approach and closing shots of the combined Harkonnen and Sardaukar forces marching off, takes about one minute and five seconds. In that one minute and five seconds, we get the entirety of the story, everything we need to know about Atreides, Harkonnen, and the Emperor. Even with spies and traitors in their ranks, Atreides still resisted the Harkonnen attack and made it hideously expensive. It’s only with the help of the Emperor that House Harkonnen wins, killing the entirety of Atreides in the process. Set, rise, twist, and tie.

I admire this. This is good craft. One fight scene taking less than a minute, with even less screen time showing close-up fighting, conveys all the larger dynamics at play in this feudal struggle.

On the one hand, I’d be worried if Villeneuve and his editors didn’t trim this back as sharply as they did. They made a two and a half hour movie, and it was just part one. If they couldn’t trim here, I wouldn’t trust them to trim… anywhere, really.

But that discipline seems to hold, and Villeneuve shows that he can make other impactful fight scenes within that constraint.

The entire sequence of Duncan Idaho’s last stand—which includes plenty of anticipatory shots, and includes cuts to Paul’s anguish and to Dr Liet Kynes leading Jessica and Paul to escape—takes less than three minutes (I’m measuring roughly from 1h 50m to 1h 53m). All of the scene is tense. Much of it is buildup. While we have a few seconds of simply watching Duncan Idaho be a badass, even that is in service of a goal; Duncan Idaho’s fight is a delaying action. His stakes: can he keep the Sardaukar busy for long enough for his liege to escape? The emotional heart of this scene, though, is twofold. It is both Duncan Idaho’s self-sacrifice, and Paul’s desperation and heartbreak at losing another loyal person he loves, admires, and trusts.

That’s a good fight scene. The choreography of the combat matters, and the performance of it matters, but all the heart would be there even if we never saw a single blow. 

So if you’re writing a fight scene that’s longer than a short sharp shock of violence, keep this in mind. Why do you care? What do you care about? And how can you use the fight scene to heighten that for you, and for the audience?

Hell, this works for big combat encounters in RPGs too.

And remember, anticipation matters. The promise of coming violence creates tension, but the actual violence might release it and require you to build that tension up once more before the audience can feel anticipation or apprehension again.

Shoot, that’s probably another post.