The Sam Mendes directed World War I film 1917 has bagged itself some serious acclaim this awards season, not least being awarded the 2020 Oscars for Visual Effects and Sound Mixing. Winning Visual Effects really isn’t surprising considering the film not only has spectacular effects but contains these effects within in “one-take” filming technique, meaning that the execution had to be flawless.
Technically, the film is actually made up of multiple long takes edited together in a way that presents the film as a single take. The whole process is pretty ingenious, but it isn’t entirely original. In fact, over the years, the single-shot technique has been used to create some truly bombastic, entertaining, and impressive action sequences. Here are the best of them, in no particular order.
Hard Boiled: Hospital Siege
There’s one element of director John Woo’s filmmaking style that likely springs to mind at the mere mention of his name: action. Whether it be grounding and enthralling or truly over the top pure spectacle entertaining (see Mission Impossible 2), likely his biggest technical feat is that of the long take in Hard Boiled.
Woo’s last Hong Kong film before making the move to Hollywood, this long take sees a two cop team move through a hospital floor by floor, shooting their way through mobsters as they go. What’s truly impressive is that each floor is actually the same set, and had to be cleared as the actors “transitioned” between them.
Atomic Blonde: Stairwell Fight
Atomic Blonde isn’t exactly director David Leitch’s best work, but one thing that has to be said is that the film’s moment-to-moment action choreography is tightly achieved. None more than the long take action sequence towards the end of the film that, while containing some well-hidden cuts, clocks in at around ten minutes.
The sequence transitions from a sharply focused and brutal brawl down a stairwell, to a bloody standoff in an abandoned apartment, then takes to the streets in a car chase that not only maintains the continuous shot but plays with the sound editing between cars. It’s a long take that gets exponentially more impressive.
The Revenant: Opening Attack
The Revenant was director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s masterful exploration in the brutality and survival instinct of man, something apparent from the film’s first shot. He’s taking a page from his own Birdman playbook and uses the long take to immerse the audience alongside the characters.
It’s the tone-setting scene, brutally difficult to watch, but impossible to look away as a group of trackers and Arikara clash in the wilderness. It also introduces us to the resourcefulness of Hugh Glass, as played by Leonardo DiCaprio, showing his true character in a life or death situation. It’s safe to say the shot achieves a lot more than just an engaging opening.
The Protector: Floor By Floor
This long shot sees the protagonist, Kham (played by legendary martial artist Tony Jaa), the last in a long line of guards that watched over the war elephants of the King of Thailand, face off against a group of thugs while making his way up a hotel lobby.
Originally titled Tom-Yum-Goong, the action and martial arts choreography on display are impressive enough as it is, but it gets more impressive when you consider the limitations presented to director Prachya Pinkaew. The cameras in use meant that the length of the shot was dictated by the length of film reel, demanding multiple takes due to running out of film.
Gravity: The Serenity Of Space
When it was released, Gravity made ripples due to the pure impressive brilliance of its effects, and it’s essentially one-woman-plot. What many forget is the precision of the opening shot. First off, the lead to the shot including some basic scape facts and then a sudden cut in the tension-filled music, because there is no sound in space, is brilliant, but what follows is just good filmmaking.
There’s a lot more character work at play than we can touch on here, but the shot itself sets up the epic scope of the visuals in orbiting the earth, the momentum of the objects that the protagonist is tied to throughout the film, and all end with the introduction of the films main conflict. Director Alfonso Cuarón really knocks it out of the park.
Children Of Men: Long Drive
As long as we’re on the subject of Alfonso Cuarón directed films, we may as well mention Children Of Men, a film made up of long takes all used in different ways. Here, we’re going to list the long take contained within the car as the cast drive between safe zones.
Much like Gravity, Cuarón tells a narrative within the shot alone, beginning with a comfortable, bonding atmosphere, which quickly takes a turn when burning wreckage roles into their path. Chaos ensues, characters die, and all thanks to an incredible rig that was built solely for this shot.
Kingsman: The Secret Service: The Church Scene
Look, it’s nigh-on impossible to talk about one-shot action sequences without bringing up the church shoot out sequence in Kingsman: The Secret Service because, as far as contemporary action goes, it’d be a baller sequence even if it wasn’t a continuous shot.
Set to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Freebird, the scene sees Colin Firth weave his gun-toting way through a church full of religious zealots. While the long shot is interrupted by reactions from other characters watching on CCTV, a longer version was originally filmed and intended to be one uninterrupted shot but was deemed “too much” for a cinematic release. The original version is somewhere, and we want to see it.
Hanna: 360 Long Shot
Hanna is a film directed by Joe Wright, following an ex-CIA agent who trains his daughter, the titular Hanna as an assassin from birth, with the intention of killing a CIA higher-up he suspects will come after them. This long take comes when Hanna’s father, Erik (played by Eric Bana) set upon by CIA agents in a subway.
The majority of the shot follows Erik as he makes his way underground, raising the tension as he becomes ever more suspicious of being followed. The actual action comes in a quick, incredibly well choreographed, burst as the camera circles the action, showing it at all angles.
Oldboy: The Hallway Brawl
Never before has a hammer been used so brutally in cinema. Oldboy, directed by Chan-wook Park, likely contains the most visceral and visually enthralling long take on this list. A revenge thriller that is regarded by most as a masterpiece, the choreography, and execution of this scene makes it easy to see why.
The camera acts as the forth wall of the hallway, tracking alongside the actors as the action moves up to and fro. It’s one man, the titular character, against an entire gang, keeping them at bay with his hammer. It’s as brutal as it sounds, as Oh-Dae Su fights his way through he takes a serious beating in return for giving a few, even getting a knife in the back and fighting on regardless.
