From Jonah Jeng's highly informed survey of the last decade’s best action scenes, including scenes from many movies you've never heard of.
In the climactic showdown of the first film, Rajamouli’s blend of slow-motion and speed ramping draws on Zack Snyder’s playbook of thunderous action filmmaking and the gravity-defying swordplay evokes the digital wuxia extravagance of late-career Zhang Yimou, but the act of assembling influences is itself an art. Rajamouli both refines each individual, borrowed stylistic strand and weaves these elements together into a single spectacular fabric marked by a thrilling rejection of Hollywood photorealism. Bodies are sent flying like rag dolls, demigod warriors belt bloodcurdling battle cries, and one fighter rides a chariot fashioned with a bladed pinwheel and brandishes a giant, retractable flail the size of a beach ball. In the action centerpiece of The Conclusion, Rajamouli reprises the elastic physics and quixotic spirit of the first film but plants a swooning courtship into the middle of the fray: as enemy forces swarm in from the surrounding hills, hero and heroine perform a deadly dance with each other while unleashing arrows at the approaching army. It is a moment that flirts with ridiculousness but—on account of Rajamouli’s willingness to go big at every level, from the radiant colors to the outsized emotions to the widescreen-worthy shots of digital multitudes—lands on the side of the sublime.
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