ZooScope

Tag: Dystopia

  • Twelve Monkeys. Dir. Terry Gilliam. Universal Pictures . 1996.

    Twelve Monkeys begins: human beings whoop and rattle in cages, buried deep underground. Wild animals roam free in the streets; in the churches, on top of this underground prison. But who dug the hole? The animals or the human… …beings? The deadly virus which forced the survivors to flee underground came from the animals. But the…

  • Gone Girl. Dir. David Fincher. 20th Century Fox. 2014.

    On the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne receives an unexpected phone call from his neighbour, who has spotted his indoor pet cat wandering outside the house. When Nick returns, not only does he discover that his cat has been misplaced, but his wife, Amy has disappeared too. Leaving a staged crime scene…

  • Arrival. Dir. Denis Villeneuve. Paramount Pictures. 2016.

    When I think of science fiction films, I immediately think of two things: aliens and explosions. Arrival plays with these expectations of the genre, asking the viewer to look at aliens in a way they’re not used to. Taking Villeneuve’s vision of the alien to be a non-human creature, it is appropriate to categorise the aliens in Arrival as…

  • Alice in Wonderland. Dir. Tim Burton. Walt Disney Pictures. 2010.

    The film draws on the viewer’s knowledge of the Disney original in the tea party scene, making it a ruin of what it once was, and presenting the Hatter as even more ‘mad’. He is seen for the first time in a close up shot, slowly looking up towards the camera, vacantly staring into the…

  • 28 Days Later. Dir. Danny Boyle. Fox Searchlight Pictures. 2002.

    You wouldn’t expect one of British cinema’s most poignant and idyllic moments to lie in the centre of a post-apocalyptic horror film, yet it does. Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later cuts in the melancholy scene at its centre, with four wild horses providing respite for the film’s central four characters by subverting the film’s primary genre…

  • Twelve Monkeys. Dir. Terry Gilliam. Universal Pictures . 1996.

    Do you want a second chance, Cole?” In other words – Do you want your body experimented upon to benefit our research again, Cole? The film cuts to a scene where Cole is injected and pinned to the time machine… or rather, torture machine. Cole never gets to answer the question – he has no…

  • Gone Girl. Dir. David Fincher. 20th Century Fox. 2014.

    Stereotypically, cats are represented as sly, sexy, intelligent, manipulative and mysterious creatures, and all of these characteristics are embodied in Gone Girl’s (dir. David Fincher, 2014) complex anti-heroine Amy Dunne. In order to understand Amy’s immensely complicated character, who only exists in flashbacks during the film’s opening scene, the film projects Amy’s character onto her husband Nick’s…

  • Mad Max: Fury Road. Dir. George Miller. Warner Bros. 2015.

    Miller’s use of post-apocalyptic colour is deliberate and ground-breaking. Mad Max: Fury Road is saturated with reds and oranges. Immediately following a fight scene that results in a lead-character casualty, the colouring changes to a palette of deep blues and blacks. This immediately creates an association around the characters within of death; alongside the Crow…

  • Noah. Dir. Darren Aronofsky. Paramount Pictures. 2014.

    God says to Noah: Take with you seven pairs of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and one pair of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate, and also seven pairs of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth.…

  • Animal Farm. Dir. John Halas, Joy Batchelor. Pathe, Universal, RKO . 1954.

    Halas and Batchelor’s 1954 Animal Farm holds a firm place in cinematic history as Britain’s second animated feature.  The film is based on the 1945 novella by George Orwell and is often read as an allegory for communism and Stalinism. The unrest of the animals and desire for revolution also has echoes of Marxist ideas about the…