Film Scene Analysis

For this assignment I analyzed a film scene from the movie Interstellar. The scene I chose was the scene when the characters land on Miller’s planet. The scene begins with the cameras cutting from each character to the next, and the cameras move naturally in the very beginning even shaking a little, so it seems as if it is cutting back and forth between each character looking at each other speaking in a way. When Anne Hathaway exits the spaceship, the camera switches to a very stable long shot, and the colors seem tinted grey scale. I think this was to emphasize the vastness and stillness of the environment they are in, which is an enormous ocean which seems to cover the entire planet. 

The camera cuts momentarily between showing Anne Hathaway’s face and then her point of view of the surrounding scenery which seem to be mountains in the distance. Throughout this entire clip actually I noticed that a common theme was to show something and then bounce to the characters to see their immediate reaction on what they were seeing that way the viewer can get a better feeling of environment and mood. 

The camera cuts to an aerial view of the entire landscape, and the clock ticking noise which has been playing in the background the entire time is really emphasized here because of the emptiness the world seems to portray. 

As the camera moves with the characters who are walking and searching for something, Anne Hathaway points out that what they might be looking for is towards the mountain. At this moment the camera cuts to Matthew McConaughey’s face as he realizes that those aren’t waves but are mountains. 

The camera switches to Matthew’s view for a second as he rushes to the back of the ship and the camera pans upwards and the pan is so slow and the wave coming is so big that you really get a sense of how massive the wave that is about to hit them. 

As the scene becomes more intense and the characters are rushing to try to escape, the camera matches the mood by becoming a lot more shaky and cutting extremely fast to show how fast things are happening from waves crashing to immediate cuts of people falling and getting soaked and falling all over the ship.