Fight Clip Club #1 - Pilgrim vs Graves

Movie: Scott Pilgrim vs The World

Scene: The final fight between Scott Pilgrim and Ramona's seventh/last evil ex, Gideon Graves.

Actors: Michael Cera, Jason Schwartzman, Ellen Wong, Mary Elizabeth Winstead

Stuntmen: Chris Mark, James Mark, Amy WY Wong

Scenario: Scott Pilgrim finally decides to fight Gideon Graves after Ramona leaves him for Gideon. Scott arrives in Gideon's chaos theater with most of his friends already there enjoying the party and his former band playing in the background officially signed under Gideon's record company.

Style: First half is sword fighting and then it becomes an unarmed fight during the final half.

Genre:  Expressionistic and Comedic

       I would say the fight is expressionistic mainly because the moves really are over the top even if the fight wasn't really "drawn out" or too long. Really it just ties in with the whole movie being over top with much of the fight scenes choreographed to resemble a fight straight out of a comic book with most of the characters having some sort of super human ability even if they don't exactly look like the traditional superheroes/super villains. 

       The fight is also comedic mainly because the entire movie as a whole was pretty much comedic, but also because I didn't actually fear for the characters well-being and they didn't really look like they had any real fear of pain/death either, so it couldn't be dramatic. It was hard deciding if this could be swashbuckling or not mainly because I still don't quite understand the difference between swashbuckling and comedic, but I decided it was not swashbuckling because the fight was short, and it didn't look like the fighters were enjoying the fight nor were they "playing" with their opponent.

Three Rules

Objective: Scott Pilgrim is trying to defeat Gideon Graves because he is Ramona's seventh and final evil ex-boyfriend. He must defeat Gideon if he wants to free Ramona from his brain control device.

Tactics: At first Scott Pilgrim tried to fight Gideon Graves by himself out of love for Ramona (thus earning him the Sword of Love) however that was not enough and he was easily defeated by Gideon Graves. Then he learns that he should try fighting for himself, so he comes back and earns the Sword of Self-Respect and fights Gideon a second time, with the help of both Knives Chau and Ramona Flowers, and finally defeats him.

Obstacles: Throughout the movie his obstacles before fighting Gideon Graves and being able to continue to date Ramona Flowers were: defeating the first six evil exes, then it was defeating Gideon's henchmen in the Chaos Theater, then Scott had to learn to fight for himself instead of fighting for Ramona, and lastly he had to fix his broken relationship with Knives Chau and admit that he cheated on both Knives and Ramona. Only after accomplishing all of this was he finally able to defeat Gideon Graves.

Why I Chose It: Scott Pilgrim vs The World is easily my favorite movie of all-time and I've watched it countless times. I just love the acting, the visual effects, the plot, the comics, the video game, everything. Although I do wish the sword fight could have been a bit longer, but then again the movie was much more than just the fights between Scott and the evil exes and I would say that it was more aimed towards being comedic than it was action, so it's understandable why most of the fights were fairly short.