Offscreen Moment of Awesome/Film


 * In The Muppets, what is referred to as an expensive-looking explosion happens behind the camera.
 * Peter Jackson cited The Lord of the Rings' Ent and Hobbit scenes as the most difficult to do well, simply because the premise sounds so objectively silly (talking trees), quaint, and nonthreatening at that point in the movie. Avoiding an Offscreen Moment of Awesome there meant he knew the audience would accept anything else afterward.
 * Often inverted, as the books tend to gloss over battles with very short, general descriptions. The departure of Boromir, for instance, was not particularly climactic in the book whereas the film version turns it into a Crowning Moment of Awesome for both Aragorn and Boromir via some extremely well-considered fight scenes.
 * Interestingly, the extended edition includes a bit of the otherwise only alluded-to fight between Gandalf and the Witch-king and storyboards of Sauron joining the fight at the Black Gate. Only the former got past storyboard, and even that was removed from the normal film run, possibly because of fans complaining Gandalf wouldn't have gotten such an early albeit interrupted beatdown. And in the case of the latter, it was removed when the crew realized how stupid it was...WHY would Sauron come to the fight himself? The whole point of destroying the Ring is so Sauron can't reclaim it and get his power back. Sauron doesn't have the Ring, therefore he doesn't have the power to fight! Not to mention the level of Adaptation Decay would be too much.
 * Then there's Gandalf's fight with the Balrog - only the start and the climax were shown. The bits in between were storyboarded, but were eventually abandoned to the disappointment of everybody who would have wanted to see the slime-Balrog and the Endless Stairs.
 * The awesome kraken in Pirates of the Caribbean was killed off in the third installment. Offscreen. All we get to see is its beached corpse. That such a mysterious and awe-inspiring creature could be killed so anticlimactically because of Cutler Beckett's desire for order and control represented the death of the fantasy and adventure of the age of the pirates.
 * Many fans of the books consider The Film of the Book Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban an Offscreen Moment of Awesome due to the omission of the Marauders' backstory - which left the end of the movie riddled with Plot Holes. (How Lupin knew what the Marauder's Map was and how it worked, the significance of the form of Harry's patronus, why Snape hated Lupin and Sirius that badly, etc.) In fact, a lot of Snape's scenes and backstory in general was omitted from the first five movies, period. Fans of the books get revolted. The ones that don't read get lost.
 * A more baffling example occurs in Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire, where the Quidditch World Cup is hyped as a major event throughout the opening scenes in both the book and the movie, of which we only see the beginning and aftermath, in a rather abrupt scene cut. Some fans explain this as Quidditch being the Novel Sport sort of filler that isn't as important to the story later on, in both the books and movies.
 * According to the director, the studio wanted him to cut Quidditch entirely, but he knew fans would have his head if he did. He settled with an intermediate position: we don't see the game, but the World Cup's still there.
 * The Predator franchise ended up doing this in the original and the first sequel. In the first one Billy Sole seems to pull a You Shall Not Pass scene when he stops at a tree trunk and pulls out a machete, only for the battle to never be shown. In the sequel when the voodoo priest who controls the Jamaican gangs ends up alone in a dark alley he pulls out a Sword Cane and challenges the Predator head on. All we see is his severed head.
 * Subverted/Averted in Predators, where a similar fight is shown.
 * Steven Spielberg's adaptation of The War of the Worlds had a scene where Tom Cruise's son climbs towards the crest of a hill, behind which is what is most likely the final stand of the armed forces in an all-out battle against the Martian Tripods. Just as he (and the audience, due to the camera angle) are just about to glimpse this spectacle... Tom Cruise tackles him. The majority of the rest of the film involves looking at the ankles of tripods from a dingy basement.
 * In Star Trek First Contact: Here, we finally have a big budget movie with proper big budget movie effects. We have the most awesome bad guys the series had come up with in years in a massive throwdown with the Federation fleet. . . and we get to listen to it over the radio while the Enterprise bridge crew stand around and look concerned? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?
 * To be fair, this was also a Whisky Tango Foxtrot moment for the entire crew of the Enterprise. That was the whole point of the scene, really.
 * Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters -- See here for why.
 * Star Wars
 * Episode I: Most of the podrace was left on the cutting room floor. In the film, we only get to see the edited highlights. The 2006 DVD reinstates some of the lost footage, but the introduction is still edited down, leaving several of the contestants unnamed.
 * Episode II: In the rough cut, a group of Jedi evade the Trade Federation's starfighters and board the mothership, then proceed to work their way to the control center and destroy it. The battle droids all shut down, as at the end of Episode I, only to reactivate soon after when a countermeasure kicks in. This would have been really cool to see, although the movie is really long already and everything that was left in is pretty crucial.
 * Episode III: For a good two decades, Star Wars fans had been waiting to see two events: Darth Vader's fall to the dark side and his consequent slaughter of his Jedi brethren. How could that not be one of the Crowning Moments of Awesome of the entire series? By only showing a couple seconds of Anakin's raid on the temple, relegating the bulk of the Jedi-slaying to the clone troopers.
 * Episode IV: Emperor Palpatine permanently disbands the Imperial Senate (formerly the Galactic Senate), a governing body that plays a large role in the saga up to this point...except we don't get to see it. Not in the original, not in the Special Edition, and not in the 2004 DVD. We don't even get to see Palpatine in the whole film. Or Coruscant.
 * Done intentionally in Grindhouse, in the Robert Rodriguez directed Planet Terror: Cherry & Wrey are just getting into a fiery sex scene... when the film suddenly cuts, and the screen says "Missing Reel." When it returns a few seconds later, the restaurant has caught fire, the zombies have broken through their defenses, and the formerly asshole sheriff does an abrupt face-turn to Rey, apologizing to him after he did something apparently awesome in the time gap.
 * "I'm sorry about before... I didn't know you were... El Rey!"
 * In The Matrix Reloaded we are told that a large number of hovercraft are assembling to fight a pitched battle against a large number of Sentinels. Rather than portray this scene together with Bane's betrayal which causes the Zion fleet to lose that battle, we are (a) subjected to one of the most indigestible "Villain's Expositions" known to man in the Architect revealing Neo's actual purpose, and (b) the battle itself gets two lines of dialogue in the last two minutes of the film. Obviously the Wachowski brothers were on a tight CGI budget.
 * To be fair, we did get to see that in one of the Enter the Matrix live-action cutscenes. However, even though said cutscenes involved movie cast and sets, they were indeed on a budget and feature no additional CGI beyond what was seen in the movie - most of the battle if still offscreen.
 * This is the point of Reservoir Dogs -- in a movie about a heist, we never see the heist, or even any of the planning of it. All we see are immediately before and after, as well as a bit of Backstory on a couple of the characters.
 * Alyson Reed, who plays Ms. Darbus in High School Musical, was a former Broadway actress, even playing Cassie in A Chorus Line. She didn't sing a note. Apparently, a song that featured duet between Ms. Darbus and Coach Bolton fighting was written for the first movie, but it was cut before it was even recorded and didn't even make it on the soundtrack as a bonus track.
 * Intentionally done in Wet, Hot American Summer, where one of the camp counselors goes to rescue the rafting campers, the camera cuts to a reaction shot of the other counselor exclaiming "Wow! You're doing it! You're really doing it! This is incredible!"
 * Rushing towards the climax of The Fifth Element, the heroes have all the divine MacGuffins, the location where they must be brought together, the key to the impressive stone door, and the former key-bearer, a hulking, armoured, dead Mondoshewan with his key-bearing arm crushed in that door, just waiting to collapse in impressive fashion when the door is opened. Except that the action jumps straight to the inner chamber, missing the whole thing out entirely.
 * In-universe, David had been sent on ahead to prepare the chamber.
 * In Avatar, we never get to see Jake's capture of the Toruk, only him falling from his original mount and later him arriving triumphant with it.
 * Because it's over in a couple of seconds when he attaches the USB braid?
 * In the direct-to-video giant monster movie Zarkorr The Invader, there is an intense battle between the Air Force and the eponymous beast. Fighter jets attack Zarkorr with napalm, engulfing the entire valley he is in in flames. Once the flames begin to die down, it is revealed that Zarkorr is completely unharmed, and he returns fire with energy beams from his eyes, blowing the jets out of the sky one-by-one. It's a shame this entire conflict takes place as a radio report the main characters listen to in their car.
 * One of just two scenes still missing from the restored Metropolis is Joh Fredersen fighting Rotwang and kicking his butt.
 * Tsukue Ryunosuke, the Villain Protagonist of Okamoto Kihachi's The Sword of Doom, is forced to go on the run after killing another samurai in a fencing match. The samurai's younger brother, Hyoma, has spent years tracking down his brother's killer, only to find him by accident. He issues a challenge to Ryunosuke to face him in an duel, a challenge that Ryunosuke accepts...but then backs out on. Even after several scenes of Hyoma training to defeat his rival, even after tracking him down yet again--a year later, and by another lucky accident--the movie ends without the climactic face-off.
 * In Hackers, two of the main protagonists (a girl named Acid Burn and a boy named Crash Override) agree to a bet which later escalates. The original bet was that if the Burn won, then Crash would be her slave (and not in a fun way) but if Crash won, then Burn would go on a date with him. When they reach a draw, they play double or nothing and agree that if Crash won, then Burn would go on a date with him and wear a dress (as opposed to the masculine clothes she prefers). But then Burn says that if she wins then Crash has to wear a dress to their date too. No one in the movie seems to notice that she agreed to go on a date with him and wear a dress whether he wins or not, and eventually they decide that Crash wins, so we never get to see the look on their faces as the implications sink. (Nor do we get to see Crash in a dress.)
 * It was awkward wording, but the implication was that Crash would have to wear a dress while serving as Acid Burn's slave.
 * In the 2000 film Supernova, a starship captain is sealed in an abandoned mine on a rogue moon. Abandoned by all but the robots, which come in all shapes and sizes. They suddenly spring to life, showing off what look like expensive animatronics. The villain comes on the PA system and informs our hero that the robots are all under his control. Then the point of view changes to the ship, and the next time we see the hero is after he's gotten past all the robots, broken out to the moon's surface, and returned to his ship via some shuttle.
 * While this is more of a offscreen moment of hilarity, we have The Consultant, a short film set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The World Security Council wants to put Emil Blonsky on The Avengers. Knowing that this is a recipe for disaster but unable to deal with it directly, SHIELD sends the most obnoxious person they know to handle negotiations with General Ross for Blonsky's release: Tony Stark. While we do get to see the first minute of Tony's meeting with Ross in a bar, the rest is left up to the viewer's imagination. The end result is that negotiations go up in flames (exactly what SHIELD wanted), Ross tried to get Tony thrown out of the bar, and Tony responded by buying the bar and having it demolished.
 * A key scene in Captain America the First Avenger where Steve has to make an impossible leap from one platform onto another as the HYDRA base explodes and crumbles in flames around him. While we do see him attempt to jump, the scene cuts away to the Allied camp, and the implication that Steve had perished in the base.
 * Tremors II has Burt Gummer recounting his encounter with a mass of Shriekers who ambushed him, describing how he "dropped the first wave with semi-auto fire" then crushed the majority underneath the wheels of his giant truck, and finished off the survivors "with a combination of small arms fire and hand-to-hand techniques" before finishing up by saying "I am completely. Out. Of ammo. ...that's never happened to me before." Arguably, his recounting is almost as good thanks to his actor's brilliant delivery of the entire spiel, leaving the whole thing to our imagination.
 * You finally get to see such an epic showdown in the beginning of Tremors 3. Only this time Burt doesn't run out of ammo. And he's also sitting in the control seat of a quad-barreled anti-aircraft gun turret. The screamers don't have much of a chance.
 * In Kingdom of Heaven, the audiences sees the preparations for the Battle of Hattin, before the film cuts away to another location. Once it returns to the Horns, the battle is already over and all we see is its bloody aftermath. Instead, the Siege of Jerusalem serves as the Climactic Battle.
 * Zig Zagged in the Icelandic film Astrópía, when the Deep Immersion Gaming fantasy setting from the main characters' roleplaying game comes back for the duration of the climatic real-life fight scene.
 * Kevin Smith uses this quite often in his films. One In Clerks 2, the characters react to a "Donkey Show" bestiality scene, but (for obvious reasons) this occurs offscreen. This could also count as Head Tiltingly Kinky, but in this case, one character (drunk) is impressed, while the others are mostly disgusted.
 * Oceans Eleven does this with the theft of the "pinch", for comedic purposes.
 * The Grey builds up to an epic, climactic fight between the hero and the alpha wolf of the pack that has been hunting him the whole movie. He tapes airplane liquor bottles to one hand for a makeshift knuckleduster, tapes a knife to the other hand, and runs at the alpha.