By Eric Lowe, guest writer

For me, the big thing that distinguishes great sword fights from good ones is technique selection.Long answer:

I really can’t count a fight scene as good if it doesn’t serve the story well. But let’s assume that we’re looking at scenes where the story is there.

I also don’t really care much about timing and distance. This is a big one, because timing and distance decide something like … I don’t know, 80% of exchanges all by themselves, and fancy techniques only work if they’re powered by a good sense of timing and distance.

But good fight choreography requires the timing and/or distance to be wrong. A well shot and edited fight scene will disguise that, but it’s never going to be right. Complaining about that is pointless. You might as well complain that movie gunfights aren’t filmed with live ammo. But as a result, good fight choreography is never going to look realistic. It is inherently incorrect in the most fundamental way.

Consequently, I try to judge staged fights on other bases when I critique their “realism.” Principally, I look at the moves chosen by the choreographer, and ask myself, “If the timing and distance were correct, would that move have made sense?”

There’s always room in there for characters to be choreographed to make mistakes, of course. Not every character needs to fence like an unflappable master. But for characters who are supposed to be good, I basically try to imagine that the timing and distance are correct and then ask whether, so imagined, the fight was good fencing.

The answer is usually no. I know people are going to ask what I think is a good movie sword fight, and the answer is: I can’t think of one. I’m not an afficianado of movie sword fights, so my sample size isn’t huge, but seriously: I can’t think of one. I can only think of individual moments or aspects.

Common flaws:

Poor Fundamentals. Many movie sword fights exhibit poor fundamental body mechanics. Enrico Toro did a great job explaining this in detail for the climactic Rob Roy fight in Enrico Toro’s Quora answer to How realistic was the sword fighting in “Rob Roy”? I don’t expect every stunt person or actor to be proficient with a live blade, but it’s often really bad. Imagine a movie fist fight where all the punches look like this:

A lot of movie sword fights are that bad with their basics.

Armor as Costume. I don’t necessarily mind armor failing at dramatically appropriate moments, by which I mean I am actually okay with things like swords stabbing through armored men, sometimes. But I consider it a mark against the choreography if people don’t act like they expect their opponent’s armor to work. If you use the exact same approach to a guy in armor that you use against that same guy in street clothes, I’m going to notice. I should be able to tell from the choreography that you consider his armor an obstacle to your weapon.

Fake Reach. As I said at the beginning, I understand that stage fighting requires distance to be wrong. But if one of the characters is supposed to have a significant reach advantage (like a spear vs. sword fight), I expect both characters to act like it. I want to see the one character having that uphill battle against the superior reach of the spear, and the other character trying to maintain or regain that advantage over the course of the fight.

Technique Selection. And here’s the big one: once you’ve done X, why is your next move your next move?

In theory you could analyze opening moves this way, but choice of opening move is so dependent on timing and distance that in practice I find it impossible. Virtually any move could be a correct opening move given a certain timing and distance, so it’s hard to critique in a medium where timing and distance are always wrong by design, and I usually give it a pass. But follow-up moves are easier.

Once swords have touched, options become significantly constrained in terms of what might make sense, because the distance between combatants is necessarily such that either can be struck with very little movement. You must maneuver yourself and your weapon(s) to keep your weapon(s) between yourself and his weapon(s), while simultaneously maneuvering your own weapon(s) between you and him so that you may strike him. There are a variety of ways to do this with any given weapon set, but there are many ways to do it wrong.

As an example, consider this video of Jon Snow fencing with a longsword (bastard sword, in Westerosi terminology):

At 0:08, Jon parries an overhead blow with his hand on the blade of his own, and then kicks his opponent. Why? Why doesn’t he stab him, instead, or clock him in the ear with his pommel? Both of those are follow-ups that are available to him; both would make more sense than a kick.

By contrast, at 0:10, Jon’s new assailant attacks him with an overhead blow that it seems is actually supposed to be too close, because Jon moves in under the attack and stabs his opponent. That makes sense (given that the opponent has made such an egregious error in his distance and timing), and it makes a lot more sense than, say, kneeing his erring opponent in the groin.

Again, I’m all for allowing choreography to include mistakes. The guy Jon stabs through the gut was clearly choreographed to make a mistake and die as a result, and that’s great. That mistake has a purpose (to emphasize Jon’s skill and heroism). Jon kicking the first dude is not a choreographed error; it’s an error in the choreography.

At 1:35, we get a big “hero” duel for Jon. It starts off with some back and forth stuff that’s all out of distance and at the wrong timing, but as I’ve said multiple times by now, I personally give that stuff a pass. But at 1:48, Jon launches into a sequence of cuts, each of which is parried by his opponent on the haft, and each of which he follows up by cutting around to the other side. That’s amateur hour stuff. If he’s going to cut around, he could just as easily cut at his opponent’s legs, which would be significantly harder to parry with an axe haft at sword-clashing range. He could also lever his tip in around the axe haft at his opponent’s face, or slide down the haft to strike his opponent on the fingers (which he could have been targeting to begin with, of course).

At 3:20, we have a pretty egregious example of bad camera angle and editing failing to hide the fact that Qhorin Halfhand is striking his blow to miss Jon: it completely collapses Jon’s parry, and yet sails right past his head. But again … it’s fight choreography; I’m okay with that. Contrast with the very next action, at 3:21: Jon and Qhorin have their blades locked together overhead at the hilt. What makes sense at this point? Jon could rotate his pommel through to smash Qhorin in the face. He could let his sword hang and wrestle Qhorin to the ground. He could use his crossguard to shove Qhorin’s sword aside and use the momentum of the shove to whip around into a cut at Qhorin’s head. But he does none of those things. He uses his crossguard to shove Qhorin’s sword aside and then … stumble backwards, for some reason. At 3:28 a similar situation obtains, and it appears that Jon actually does cut at Qhorin … though the editing makes it hard to tell.

One last example, showing what I mean by fake reach:

At 5:00, Jon faces an opponent with two knives. The fact that his opponent has two daggers makes this trickier than if his opponent only had one, but Jon is choreographed to have a significant reach advantage in this fight. Does he use it? Well … he does get the first blow in, at 5:09. That’s something. The next two actions of the exchange show him staying at sword distance while his opponent tries to close to knife range, and when the opponent finally does, Jon spins away. Good! Then, at 5:21, does he attack once his opponent clears the fire? No, his opponent moves first, and Jon … blocks for some reason, instead of stabbing the knife fighter.

I’ve chosen this example because it comes from a well-known show where the errors in technique selection are fairly easy to see. This is because the fight choreography on Game of Thrones is not especially good apart from the technique selection. It tells an okay story, but the physical performance and photography of it do a poor job of hiding the fact that the distance and timing are wrong. That likewise makes it fairly easy to see where the choreography itself is wrong, though.

If we wanted to, we could also critique all these fights for their horrific fundamentals (the technique of everybody in this show who uses a Westerosi sword is almost distractingly bad, and I actively try to suspend my disbelief about this stuff). But even if the fundamentals and reach were good, even if the photography and editing were better, these are still fights that have lousy technique selection, because the techniques choreographed too often make no sense.

Eric Lowe is the head instructor of Swordwind Historical Swordsmanship (swordwind.org) in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA, where he studies and teaches Kunst des Fechtens and Bolognese fencing.