Why are they battles in movies seem to be the skilled vs the many.
For instance, in Lord of the Rings, the fellowship (minus the hobbits) all have great skills against the orcs, who have no skills but great numbers.
Or the campers, have no skills, or survival instinct, but Jason has mad skills. The guy is an artist.
The Seven Samurai/Magnificent 7, highly skilled, the bandit army not so much.
There are hardly any battles of the evenly matched in skill and number in films.
Why is that? Can you think of any?
In fantasy epics, typically there is one or a small group of main characters so the viewer can more easily identify with them. If you have a big faceless army, then all you can really identify with is one person in that army, where you wouldn’t be making much of a difference.
The only times when you have evenly matched skills and numbers, of course, are in one-on-one duels. War films typically have a skilled number vs a skilled number, but the focus is typically on the greatness of the generals who lead them.
Examples of skilled vs skilled might be those sports films where a loser team rises to the occasion and finally beats their rival team and gives those snobs their comeuppance once and for all.
Note that Saruman’s and Sauron’s main forces were not only large, they were quite skilled and adept. They managed to break through the awesome defenses at Helm’s Deep and Minas Tirith respectively in a disgustingly quick amount of time.
If you’ve got an entire movie consisting of just two guys going against one another, then by the end of it, they’re both looking pretty incompetent. You gotta see some attacks land so that you know you’re dealing with badasses.
Problem is, if the killing blows land on good guys, the movie gets downbeat pretty quick. So you want the blows to land on the bad guys.
Problem is, if the bad guys get killed off early, you don’t have much of a movie. So you make tons of bad guys as fodder for the good guys to chew through, and then you have the final boss scene, where the good guys finally meet their match in the head bad guys.
I can’t quite remember, but it seems as if in Watership Down, the two sides are evenly matched, at least until the dogs show up.
You should watch more Westerns (esp. of older vintage) - and add to your OP… why is it that the cavalry (and the settlers) are such crack shots and the wave, after wave, after wave, after wave of Indian attackers can’t hit the broad side of a barn with the rifles. :smack:
Kill Bill has the many who were skilled(the Crazy 88 were not a mindless bunch of unskilled attackers) combined with one on one battles of the super skilled. It made for a good mix.
Some that come to mind :
Posleen vrs humans ( Legacy of the Aldenata books)
Arachnids vrs the Grand Alliance in In Death Ground and The Shiva Option.
The Morphodite from the series of the same name destroys entire cultures by itself, with pure skill ( the ability to calculate the weak points of a culture and exploit them ).
They did hyave it in the “Dark Ages” and it was not nearly so great as you might think. Suffice it to say that gunpowder did not spark a major redesign of fortress defences until the mid-late Renaissance.
In any case, only Saruman had it, and he didn’t have much.
I can’t remember how they handle it in the movie but in the book it is pretty clear that both sides know the Watership rabbits can’t win the battle on conventional terms. It is going to be a siege and it will only be a matter of time before the more numerous and more experienced Efrafans win as they have every time they encountered similar situations in the past.
That’s why the Watership rabbits resort to the mechanism you mention in your spoiler, because they can’t match up with the Efrafans.
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