Children Of Men Vs Blade Runner

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Every decision that a director makes is done for a purpose. The director of Blade Runner (1982), Ridley Scott, THX 1138 (1971), George Lucas, and Children of Men (2006) by Alfonso Cuarón each set up their films with landscapes and strategically filmed around these landscapes in order depict a message beyond the storyline.
Scott’s Blade Runner is a hybrid film that combines aspects of film noir, a detective and a science fiction film. Scott manipulates the landscape and setting to match the film noir label. The film parallels Metropolis in the sense that both films revolve around class level to physical position in a city. The lower class is in the lowest level in the city and the upper class is at the highest level in the city. Scott plays …show more content…

The film is set in a society where everything is in uniform control. The color white is a running theme for the lack of individualism. All of the rooms Lucas shows are white and set up in similar ways to preserve uniformity. Also, all the character’s wear white throughout the film. This removes human individualism, shining light on the director’s critical view of communism. Lucas composes his shots to be filmed as a frame within a frame. The film begins with an image of an old commercial within a television and then in the next cut we see surveillance of our characters through a screen. Everything in this world is surveillanced by machinery. With this surveillance, we have close up shots of the characters throughout the film to preserve the idea of the system watching them. The use of filming a frame within a frame desensitizes the subject within the inner image. For example, when THX 1138 is held captive, the workers fiddle with the control frequencies and cause THX 1138 pain and offer no concern or help. Lucas brings the idea that once things become an image, they lose their meaning. This is the reason we can watch gore and pain in silence in movie theaters. The conformation commentary is extended into the white jail where THX 1138 was placed in. While the rest of the film was boxed in with frames within frames, Lucas now films in a manner that …show more content…

Cuarón’s cinematography techniques focus on differentiating the events shown in the foreground versus the events shown in the background via deep focus photography. The foreground follows the story of our anti-hero while the background follows the story of the world. The two stories of the foreground and background clash in the bus scene where Kee’s water breaks. In this shot, Theo comforts the only pregnant woman in an infertile world, while in the background, Cuarón shows the audience how poorly the refugees are being treated. Following his hand-held camera, as the bus rolls out of the camp we see a long-shot, in deep focus, showing the refugees being thrown into cages and how they are tortured and forced to undress and walk in strict formation. This imagery is a historical reference to our involvement in WW2 and the war against terrorism, including the immoral interrogation techniques and general dehumanization of people. Cuarón constantly plays with the depth of field and focus in order to show us another story while still following the main story in the

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