Analyzing Film Openings
To better understand the project I'm getting myself into, I looked into examples of various sci-fi dystopian film openings and picked 3 to research and analyze. One being the first Maze Runner and Hunger Games movies and Interstellar. With this, I hope to view different ways/strategies I can form my own creative start to a film.
Maze Runner:
This opening scene shows what seems to be the main character of the Maze Runner in an underground elevator thats taking him up. He's in distress, coughing, stumbling, and looking around, almost like he's confused by what's happening. All of a sudden, some type of beast bangs against the cage-like elevator, and he bangs against the top (maybe to the surface), screaming for help. When the lift reaches him to the top, he faces a group of boys his age (teenagers to young men) looking down at him. Which, they seem to know what's happening to him and to have been through it before. He then starts running away from them, obviously threatened, and thats when he faces the giant maze.
Though this might not be the approach I'll be going for at all, I like the way that we know that he isn't the only one going through whatever is happening, or has gone through it. That it seems that he is the main character, but also one amongst many and not the main idea of the entire movie. Also, the elephant in the room would be the maze and the creature that was underground. I have never seen this movie before, and it already makes me want to put pieces together in my head. Do the monsters also roam in the maze? Are they the major threat or just a motive for these boys to keep going instead of revolting? But what we do know is that our protagonist isn't a mighty hero, at least not at first, and that he is part of a practice many others like him fall victim to.
Hunger Games:
The start of this first scene sets it off with some background information from the Hunger Games book, explaining what set the games in motion and the baseline of how they work. From this we also learn that there are districts in this world as well as the capitol, which makes me assume is where the people in power reside. Then we view two characters in glamorous attire and hairdos on a stage. The man on the right with the black and red suit, who we learn to be the head game-maker, is talking about the importance of the games and how he thinks they bring their world together. Obviously, this is a clouded overview of what we already know to be a violent, inhumane affair. Then, whilst he's being asked what his "personal signature" is it cuts to a girl screaming in one of the districts. Here is where we meet the main character as she comforts her sister who's afraid of being reaped. She then leaves the house.
This is a great opening because besides the background knowledge we receive, we learn a lot of background knowledge by casual conversation and slight representation through costume, setting, and the cut from one scene to another. By seeing the two people at the start in contrast to Katniss and her sister Prim, we know who is the privileged party. While one side wears fashionable, loud, and bright colored clothing, another wears simple rags that lack any color at all. This represents the rift in between the districts and the capitol, but also the difference in life styles. The people in the capitol truly believe the hunger games are a good thing, while the districts live in reality. Not to mention the clear difference in the settings, a lit up stage to a broken down town with small houses. Furthermore, through dialogue we are told various different things. For example, the man with the blue hair tells us there was a rebellion, and that the games helped fight against it, pacified it. And at the end where Katniss tells the grumpy cat that she'll cook it if it comes to it, lets us know the poverty they live in right off the bat.
Interstellar:
Interstellar has a different approach to its opening. While in the hunger games we are a spectator of an interview happening within the story, the interviews we view in Interstellar look like they're from documentaries. Documentaries of aged people who were kids when the world's tragedy was happening, talking about their families, the worldly issues, and the precautions they had to take to protect themselves against it. One of the ladies who mentioned that "the blight" took over her family's farm, and they had to burn it. She goes on to explain how they still kept their corn but had to face dust storms to which families had to wear masks and be cautious of where they eat and drink from. Somewhere in the opening we see a man, who appears to be the father of one of the women in the documentary, having a nightmare about a plane crash.
While in the prior movies we're shown that a government or people in power are responsible for the troubles in their world, in this opening we only see bizarre dust storms and "the blight," some type of rot that destroys agriculture. We don't know if any of these were caused by a regime. What we do know is that the man who seems to be our main character is traumatized by a crash which haunts his dreams, that the people in the past had to face bizarre weather and agricultural ruin, and that somehow society/humanity manages to get past it.
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Overviewing different film openings of the genre I'm choosing to represent successfully helped me in getting further ideas on how to cultivate details to help the audience understand certain things about the plot I'm trying to build in a dystopian world.
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