Thank you, my friend!

So, again, easy for a reader to misdiagnose.

Most readers are novelists or journalists, and reaction is a totally valid move in those media... but actors perform actions.

Reaction forces the character to sell the thing they're reacting to, and it always feels like they're selling something as a result.

That's a bigger problem than just the scene, at that point.

You don't need to project motivation, or explain it. If a character is pursuing their goal, that momentum is palpable even if the action doesn't make sense on the face of it.

If you're finding that the action does NOT make sense? I'll bet you anything your character is in a reactive state.

That would actually feel like too much to a reader. They've misdiagnosed it, but that would be a note worth looking at.

Characters are always doing their best to achieve their goals. If your protagonist is just trying to shut down some jerk and get out the door, let them do their absolute best. Let the other fighter do likewise - but if the fight is there for the camera, and not because the protagonist wants it?

One thing to watch out for, though, is pacing on the screen.

Was it a fight that the protagonist COULD have ended faster? Maybe it wasn't too much detail. Maybe it was too much fighting!

Don't internalize stupid notes, for sure.

Personally, I use screenplay contests as testing grounds for the readers certain companies hire. If someone's not placing a script I know to be good, then that's not a great place for me to get coverage and other services. But even within a company, the quality of reads can vary a lot.

Ah.

Readers come from all different backgrounds, and they all have different levels of expertise. Notes are a crapshoot, for sure.

Someone else might have praised you for it.

Research!

Nothing's wrong with relying on a stunt choreographer, but actions are actions just as much in the prose as in the dialogue. If you know your characters, and if you know fighting, then write those fight scenes the way your characters would fight them.

If you don't know enough to do that?

If you're writing a lot of detail into how a punch is thrown, then the reader will probably see that punch in slow motion in their mind. Your director might shoot it slower, to catch all that detail.

If it's just the word "Punch," then it might happen so fast on the screen you could miss it.

Apart from that, a good rule of thumb is that you should write the level of detail you want the camera to absorb. If you write half a page of prose, then theoretically it should take the camera 30 seconds to shoot that material.

Just make sure there's 30 seconds of photography there.

One thing I will tell you is that putting visual aids in your script is always a mistake. Formatting exists to make the script function as a reference tool, like a dictionary. Anything that breaks formatting makes it harder to flip through on set - and it throws the page count off.