ZooScope

Tag: Disaster

  • Outbreak. Dir. Wolfgang Peterson. Warner Bros. 1995.

    Outbreak forewarns of the devastating consequences of animal exploitation, encapsulating them in the scene where Jimbo delivers Betsy, host monkey for the deadly Motaba virus, to a pet shop where she will be sold illegally. The camera employs an establishing shot of Jimbo’s car on a road surrounded by a forest, juxtaposing road and forest in…

  • Planet of the Apes. Dir. Franklin J. Schaffner. 20th Century Fox. 1968.

    Planet of the Apes (1968), dir. Franklin J. Schaffner It is from the Planet of the Apes’s first encounter with its ‘more or less human’ characters that we are made aware of their muteness; something that shapes the human/animal relations throughout the film. In his ignorance of the subverted hierarchy the film explores, Taylor, the main character,…

  • The Grey. Dir. Joe Carnahan. Inferno. 2012.

    ‘You are going to die. That is what’s happening.’ After spending five monotonous weeks working as a hired wolf exterminator ‘doing some of that sniper shit’[i] at an oil refinery in Alaska, near suicidal John Ottoway (Liam Neeson) boards a plane bound for home, along with his fellow men ‘unfit for mankind.’[ii] When their flight clashes violently…

  • Jaws. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Universal Studios. 1975.

    Jaws, Spielberg’s second major film[1] , released in 1975 is widely recognised as an important piece of cinema, with one of the most memorable and suspense building soundtracks of all time. Despite the creepy and more blood thirsty elements of the film there are also moments of humour, as comedy plays quite a large role in…

  • Planet of the Apes. Dir. Franklin J. Schaffner. Twentieth Century Fox. 1968.

    Planet of the Apes is a story that takes a look at what the world would be like if Apes filled the role of humans, and vice-versa. What the film manages to do is not only point out how humans perceive animals as wild, and something that should be locked up and studied, but also…

  • Bringing Up Baby . Dir. Howard Hawks. RKO. 1938.

    In the romantic comedy Bringing Up Baby (1938) Hawks explores the association between animalism (behaviours or feelings associated with animals) and chaos. The comedy emerges out of the interactions between the unlikely pair: Susan (Catherine Hepburn) and David (Cary Grant). This is because Susan is an eccentric, chaotic and a law evading romantic and David is a…

  • Beasts Of The Southern Wild. Dir. Benh Zeitlin. Fox Searchlight Pictures. 2012.

    Beasts of the Southern Wild is set in Bathtub, a poor and very ethnically-mixed community in the Louisiana Bayou separated from other civilisation by a levee, a backdrop which conjures up the still fresh memory of Hurricane Katrina. The global warming induced flooding of the area and all that ensues are focalised through the imagination of the…

  • Godzilla. Dir. Ishirō Honda. Toho. 1954.

    Synopsis “If we continue to test nuclear weapons, another Godzilla may arise.” The closing line of Honda’s Godzilla, emphasised by a prolonged close-up of the speaker’s face, is proudly overt in its political overtones. Produced in the wake of the 1945 bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Godzilla’s use of an indestructible, prehistoric creature as a metaphor for nuclear warfare…

  • Life of Pi. Dir. Ang Lee. 20th-Century Fox. 2011.

    Ang Lees’s Life of Pi is a shipwreck film that depicts the epic journey of the main character Piscine ‘Pi’ Molitor Patel, whilst addressing many issues along the way such as those of personal loss, racism, survival and many more. Lee is able to achieve this level of depth in his novel chiefly by using the potential…