Offscreen Moment Of Awesome / Film

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• Kevin Smith uses this quite often in his films. One In Clerks II, 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.

• 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.
• In Attack the Block, an alien enters an elevator that the gangster Hi-Hatz entered just as the doors close. We hear screaming and fighting noises. The elevator comes to another floor and opens. Hi-Hatz steps out, covered in blood but fine, with the alien dead.
• In the BIONICLE movie The Legend Reborn, a gigantic army comprised of fighters, villagers and battle chariots appears to challenge the combined army of the Skrall and Bone Hunters. We never see any of them fight, only the five main characters. After the battle's done, Vastus and Tarix, both legendary fighters, arrive to the scene, claiming that it's a miracle they survived the fight which viewers didn't get to see. The DVD revealed that a lot of the battle got cut, although even the planned scenes wouldn't have shown much more.
• Brave: The fight between Fergus and Mor'du became a legend, yet the scene cuts away at the beginning of this epic event. Mor'du's jaw has clearly been broken at some point!
• Coneheads: Only a glimpse of the start of Beldar's homemade firework is seen; the rest shows the audience's astonished reaction.
• In Crank: High Voltage, we see Chelios enter a run-down building occupied by prostitutes and criminals. Immediately after he enters, hookers start running out screaming, and thugs go flying out the windows, doors, and walls. Presumably Chelios is kicking ass like it's nobody's business inside, but we don't get to see the actual fighting.
• The climax of horror movie Creature , with the main character fighting the creature, is done off-screen. To make it worse, there is No Ending.
• The Fast and the Furious: Furious 7 opens with Deckard Shaw in his brother's hospital room, vowing revenge on the team who put him there. Then he calmly makes his exit — through the absolutely wrecked hospital, casually stepping over the dozens of policemen he killed en route.
• In GoodFellas, the execution of the Air France and Lufthansa huge heists is not explicitly shown. There's some planning and location shots, but most of the information is given via exposition. (This is probably because both of these heists could easily take up an entire movie by themselves, and there's a lot of other material this movie has to cover beside the heists.)
• 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. Then the movie ends. The Stinger has Ottway and the wolf lying in a heap, both breathing their last.
• 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. Bonus points because the sheriff is also lying on a table bleeding to death because one of his own men accidentally shot him during the missing reel.
• In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the Quidditch World Cup is hyped as a major event throughout the opening scenes, but we only see the beginning and aftermath, in a rather abrupt scene cut.
• The big bike race between feuding gangs or whatever (it's hard to tell) in The Hellcats is completely unseen between the point where the guys ride off and their approach to the finish line. We are treated to the onlookers' faces for an absurdly long time instead.
• 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.
• The Hunger Games: Just like the novel, you never really get to see Thresh in action. Pretty weird too, considering he was hyped as one of the stronger competitors. Onscreen, however, he kills Clove in just one move, and she's absolutely terrified of him.
• There's a lengthy stretch near the end of Invasion of Astro-Monster where King Ghidorah, the Big Bad of the Godzilla series and arguably its most dangerous monster, attacks America instead of just sticking to Japan like usual. However, we just hear about it rather than seeing it, presumably because the construction of another miniature city wasn't in the budget.
• In early film Joan of Arc (1900), we don't see Joan's great victory at Orleans, but rather the triumphal parade that follows. Georges Méliès, working on one small soundstage, had neither the room nor the budget to recreate a great battle.
• 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.
• In Kingsman: The Secret Service, Roxy's almost entire career pretty much, despite being the most capable candidate. Her only moments in the limelight were stressing about her fear of heights and being consoled by Eggsy... Until she gets over it and then some by shooting off a satellite while floating in the stratosphere. Taken literally when we're informed that she just passed the speeding train test before Eggsy even had his. And again when she passes the Shoot the Dog test offscreen, but you hear her pull the trigger in the next room.
• Little Monsters (2019): Audrey has to fight her way through several zombies to retrieve the backpack with Felix's life-saving EpiPen. When she turns around, she sees a huge crowd of zombies have arrived. She raises her shovel, at which point we cut back to the gift shop where everyone's hiding, and she arrives covered in "strawberry jam."
• The Lord of the Rings:
  • The Fellowship of the Ring: Galadriel gives Gimli three strands of her hair when the Fellowship leaves Lothlorien. This is a significant act of friendship between the historically-hostile Elves and Dwarves, but in the film adaptation it's recounted after the fact by Gimli instead of being shown on screen^note John Rhys-Davies said that this was because it would have been awkward for him to take the hair and somehow store it while wearing full armor and gloves.
  • The Return of the King: Happens twice with Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli immediately prior to the Battle of the Pellenor Fields.
• At one point in Mad Max: Fury Road, the War Rig is being randomly threatened by a group led by The Bullet Farmer firing blind — literally, thanks to Furiosa's sniper shot — in the dark. Max walks off into the fog with only a knife and a gas can. After a few minutes of the Wives, Nux, and Furiosa working to fix the rig, there's an explosion. Another minute later, Max walks back up to the War Rig covered in blood. It's not his blood.
• 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. The battle itself gets two lines of dialogue in the last two minutes of the film.
• One of just two scenes still missing from the restored Metropolis is Joh Fredersen fighting Rotwang and kicking his butt.
• In Mirage (1965), Gregory Peck's character is held hostage in his own apartment by a hired killer, who makes himself at home by watching Professional Wrestling. When the two men fight, the camera shows the TV screen—then turns to Peck (who presumably took tips from the wrestlers) standing over the defeated assassin.
• In Mission: Impossible III, Ethan's theft of the Rabbit's Foot is never shown, though part of the infiltration is seen. Instead, we are given an Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene over the theft.
• In The Muppets (2011), what is referred to as an expensive-looking explosion happens behind the camera. Fozzie comments on how it must have eaten up the budget.
• Ocean's Eleven does this with the theft of the "pinch", for comedic purposes.
• In Pacific Rim, Coyote Tango's battle against Onibaba is heard entirely from Mako's perspective as she hides in an alleyway. In a flashback, no less.
• 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.
• 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. The very next thing we see is the Predator walking away carrying the guy's severed head, followed by the Predator carefully cleaning and polishing the skull and mounting it prominently in his trophy case, indicating the voodoo priest must've put up a pretty good fight.
• Pulp Fiction: Butch's boxing match. He's accepted money to take a dive, but bets everything (including his life) on winning and skipping town with the proceeds. He not only wins the bout, but kills his opponent. We only see him immediately before and afterward.
• 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.
• In Resident Evil: Afterlife, when the group escapes the prison through the sewers, Luther West is grabbed by the zombies and dragged into the darkness. Everybody sadly concludes that he's dead and moves on. Near the end of the movie, Luther emerges from the sewers, alive and well, and kills the last of the zombies chasing him.
• Invoked for the climax of Serenity despite the viewpoint characters being right in the middle of it; the camera is focusing mainly on the eponymous ship as they attempt to dodge through and around the massive Alliance Navy vs Reavers throwdown engineered by Mal. We only see the occasional explosion or chunk of debris hurtling across the screen, and it actually works really well.
• Done to near-perfection at the end of Starman. We don't see Starman leaving Earth; we only see Jenny's face as she watches him go. The sight of Karen Allen looking directly at the camera... as the camera slowly rises is far more powerful than any special effects shot could be.
• Star Wars:
  • Revenge of the Sith: 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.
  • A New Hope:
    • 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.
    • Also, the Opening Narration says that the Rebel Alliance won its first battle against the Imperials and swiped the plans for the Death Star. What we get to see is a lone ship trying to outrun a Star Destroyer with the plans. The story is finally told in Rogue One.
• 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.
• 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.
• Subject of a gag in The Three Stooges Meet Hercules: When it comes time to battle the dreaded nine-headed hydra, the designated hero announces this fact, charges off-screen, there's some sound effects, and back he comes, that takes care of the hydra!
• Teen Titans: The Judas Contract: Raven and Terra's unseen battle left the room they were in utterly trashed. While we don't see how it got that way and it's clear that Terra eventually won, those two girls threw down a major battle.
• The Time Traveler's Wife (2009) starts with the protagonist as a young boy being involved in a car accident which kills his mother and causes him to time travel (basically just to teleport out off the car) for the first time in his life. This is filmed beautifully, many fans fully expected to see what was regarded as one of the most cinematic moments of the book: how the scenery is full of dozens of later-day Henrys who couldn't help but travel back to this pivotal point in their life (time travel is not under the character's control). Unable to prevent the tragedy, only able to assist their younger self. That was apparently too much of a challenge, the situation is only mentioned later in the movie during an argument.
• In Titan A.E., there's a scene with resident Wrench Wench Akima waking up in a Drej escape pod, in the middle of a cell full of soon-to-be-auctioned slaves — most of whom are much larger than her and all of whom are looking down at her with obviously predatory intent. One short scene later, the rest of the crew arrives to rescue her, and finds her sitting on top of a pile of unconscious prisoners, grinning and greeting them with "What took you?"
• Tremors 2: Aftershocks 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. Watch it here.
• In Turning Red, after Mei proves that she can keep her emotions under control, she seeks to ask Ming's permission to go to the 4*Town concert. Quick cut to a close-up Ming giving her a firm no, followed by a wide-shot of Mei having concluded an elaborate multimedia presentation about why she should see the concert, flaming sparklers still in hand.
• Twice Round the Daffodils: When Mrs. Rhodes comes to visit, John tells his wife of the time he did a striptease to get a laugh out of the other patients, and how Matron walked in on him.
• In, Utøya: July 22, a reenactment of the Breivik Massacre (which happened on the island Utøya on 22. July 2011) from the perspective of the victims, swimming to the mainland (over 600 m through cold seawater) is presented as nearly impossible, yet it's implied that Emilie, the main heroine's sister did this, got somebody with a boat to help, and returned with him to the island, despite all the danger.
• Steven Spielberg's adaptation of War of the Worlds (2005) 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.
• 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!"
• 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.

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