posted
Add to Category 1 - the duel between Uma Thurman and Lucy Liu (sorry, I can't remember LL's character name) in Kill Bill II
Posts: 4515 | Registered: Jul 2004
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1. Zulu 2. Return of the King 3. Open Range 4. Last of the Mohicans (the ambush of the British after their surrender) 5. Black Hawk Down 6. The Last Samurai 7. We Were Soldiers Once 8. Saving Private Ryan
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1. Saving Private Ryan - The normandy scene is amazing 2. Band of Brothers - chock full of em 3. Two Towers - Helms Deep, ROTK was good, but Helms deep was better 4. Gettysberg - The whole movie, again with the chock full of em 5. The Empire Strikes Back - The Battle of Hoth is a classic 6. Gladiator - The opening battle is amazing. 7. The Last Samurai - The final battle is very good 8. Zulu - sadly it is accurate to life, and it is also very good 9. Braveheart - loses points for inaccuracy, but still kick ass battles 10. The Memphis Bell - Amazing air battles, pretty much the entire movie is one long one.
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I don't know if anyone's seen King Kong yet, but does the battle between King Kong and the T-Rex's count? I personally thought it was pppreeetttyyyy cool.
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I was wondering if with all of the great movies that have come out recently anyone would like to put down new opinions.
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The Protecter- Tony Jaa is just plain awesome most of the time anyway but he has one fight in this movie with capoeira specialist in a flooded/burning temple. All the water getting kicked up by the two of them really set the scene apart for me.
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For Zarex's catagory 4, there's a battle in the 08th MS Team that was simply great. I think it was the dual between the main character and the sympathetic enemy ace in like episode 10 or 11. Great duel for a giant robot show, if I remember right.
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While a two or three hour movie is enough for me to care about two or three people, it takes hours for me to get invested in a cast of characters.
(Which is why maybe the multi-part (or with lead-in) LOTR, ST, or Serenity battles stand tall to me in the existing lists)
So my personal list would probably insert TV instances, this would be a quick off-the-top of my head list for TV:
$ $ For BSG, B5, ST:DS9, SG $
1. Babylon 5: Severed Dreams (multiple parts around declaration of independence) 2. BSG: Exodus (Liberation of New Caprica) 3. ST:DS9: Sacrifice of Angels (Starfleet attempt to reach DS9) 4. SGA: The Siege (multipart-episode surrounding Wraith attack on Atlantis) 5. BSG: Daybreak (Assault on the colony) 6. BSG: The Hand of God (Refinery attack) 7. Babylon 5: The Fall of Night (Destruction of Narn fleet) 8. SG1: Camelot (Ori invasion through the Supergate) (Edit to add: Or maybe the battle over Antarctica) 9. Band of Brothers (can't really narrow it down)
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I had no idea this was an ancient thread when I started reading and I have nothing recent to add, but like many previous posters my first thought on reading the OP was that I found Agincourt in Henry V very moving. And I don't even like battle scenes.
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quote:1. Saving Private Ryan - The normandy scene is amazing 2. Band of Brothers - chock full of em 3. Two Towers - Helms Deep, ROTK was good, but Helms deep was better 4. Gettysberg - The whole movie, again with the chock full of em 5. The Empire Strikes Back - The Battle of Hoth is a classic 6. Gladiator - The opening battle is amazing. 7. The Last Samurai - The final battle is very good 8. Zulu - sadly it is accurate to life, and it is also very good 9. Braveheart - loses points for inaccuracy, but still kick ass battles 10. The Memphis Bell - Amazing air battles, pretty much the entire movie is one long one.
This is a very good list by Alcon.
I'd also agree that the Matrix Revolutions battle was LAME.
Super AI: Instead of one of us breaking free from the pack and going and killing the guy shooting at us, lets just stay all herded in one mass so all of his bullets hit us. We'll fly by and get creamed that way.
The special effects may have been good, I couldn't tell through all my eye rolling .
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I hate thread necromancy but I have to state that We Were Soldiers is one big long battle scene.
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quote:Originally posted by WntrMute: Patton. And though I hated Saving Private Ryan, I think the battle scenes were done well.
Excaliber, though!?!? Please. I liked the movie, but the battle scenes were not all that well done.
Actually, the battle scenes in Excalibur were excellent, and had a little more reality than you think. The producers got local villagers involved as extras, and some of the towns and people have hated each other for generations, so when they yelled cut people kept on fighting. They really WERE beating the hell out of each other, and it took a long time to get them to stop.
It's probably the closest to an actual battle than any of have seen, at least from that time period. Posts: 15082 | Registered: Jul 2001
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Does the "long take" hospital scene in Hard Boiled count?
And, to be quite honest, despite Patton being one of my favorite movies, you could argue that there was only one real battle scene in it (the Battle of El Guettar, the battle in the beginning immediately after Kasserine Pass).
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Man, seeing a post from almost 5 years ago is weird. I was like... 5 years younger back then. Crazy. I mean, you can tell to. I can't even remember the scene from King Kong I was talking about. Psh. I was such a battle scene amateur back then...
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posted
I don't know how it stacks up against more recent movies, but the battle scene in "Gunga Din" would have been included in this list 30 years ago.
Posts: 3735 | Registered: Mar 2002
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There's an old Sam Fuller movie with Claude Akins called "Merrill's Marauders." There's a sequence toward the end in which a squadron of American infantry fight Japanese on the island of Burma, amidst a rail yard filled with an array of giant concrete blocks. The whole thing is creepy and suspenseful. Individual men are stalking each other through this block yard which is like a great stone labrhynth. It makes everything look so personal.
I kind of felt the same way in the sequence in "Hurt Locker" where the bomb squad guys meet the contractors who have captured some insurgents and they get ambushed by some other insurgents, and because both sets of combatants are pinned down over very long range, the battle take place with spotting scopes and sniper rifles. At one point in the scene they show a close up of one non-com's face and he's filthy and sweaty and his eye is glued to the scope and he looks like he doesn't dare blink because he knows he can't miss his one shot to kill the insurgent who is about 3000 yards away who is only going to show himself for a second.
Big battles like Braveheart and The Patriot are ok, but those two really made an impression.
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I have to say that after seeing it the fight in the hotel hallway in Inception is one of the most awesome things I have ever seen.
It's short, but man the intensity and the uniqueness of that fight will make it stick out in my memory for a long time.
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I think a distiction should be made between battle scenes, and fight scenes. They are not the same.
I say this in particular having re-watched the battle scene in Gunga Din, to refresh my memory. It begins with a fight, which is pretty terrible. But as it transitions to the battle, there's a stark difference, where camera placement becomes critical in order to see troop position, landscape, and movement. If all you see are the front lines clashing, it gives no sense of the strategy or how battles can turn as a result of the landscape, etc.
Posts: 3735 | Registered: Mar 2002
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posted
I definitely agree that a battle scene and a fight scene have to be split up.
Episode IV's attack on the death star was extremely epic for its time. The scene where all the X-Wings, Y-Wings, and A-wings are approaching in formation and you can see the pilot inside the lead X-Wing still gives me chills every time.
I think the imperial walker attack in Episode V is epic in that for once the bad guys with all the resources, just plow through the good guys. Which is what should happen a bit more in cinema/books when I examine my gut feeling on the matter.
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posted
Maybe to split it further, with some of my choices:
fight scene, two combatants: Henry Silva and Frank Sinatra in "Manchurian Candidate"
fight scene, multiple combatants: Tim Holt, Humphrey Bogart, and that cheatin' oil rig guy in "Treasure of Sierra Madre"
battle scene, "low-tech": final battle, "Seven Samurai"
battle scene, high-tech: rushing the allied trenches, "All Quiet on the Western Front"
battle scene, sf or fantasy: troopers versus the bugs, "Starship Troopers" or marines retreating vs aliens "Aliens"
Looking back over my choices I see why, whenever I invite certain friends over for a movie they always ask, "Is this movie in color and is it one I'm going to have to read?"
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I'll still get get 'em over to the house. I'll just say, "Hey, I'm gonna make that soylent green thing you like."
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I just watched Kick Ass...Hit Girl working her way through the hall is amazing. Need to watch it more than once to catch it all though.
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One cool thing is to see the homages to it over the years. From Jet Li's showy one, Stephen Chow's comedic one, and Donnie Yen's awesome dark one.
I think even Jackie Chan had to re-do the whole movie at the beginning of his career although that turned out to be a flop unlike the former three.
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