The film starts out with a blacked out screen with what are
obviously news reporter voices over the top. I like this effect as it shows
tells the audience what is going on, without just putting facts up on the
screen, I also like this as there is some sub knowledge that we aren’t given as
we assume is general knowledge to everyone as it is the norm to the characters.
We are left to work out that people have stopped having children but we aren’t
just told this, we are however told that the world’s youngest person had died
at the age of 18 years, 4 months, 20 days, 16 hours and 8 minutes.
When we eventually get a picture we are shown the inside of
a shop crammed with people watching the news story all with glum faces. We have
almost every type of person in this one shot; whites, browns, blacks, Asians, a
police man, a young couple, a business man even an old lady and her little dog.
This shot also has a TV in the background at the other end of the shop allowing
us to see what they are watching while we can also see the expressions. A man
breaks through to the front of the café and buys a coffee, he is standing in
the middle of shot and so we are of understanding that this is our main
character. A double decker red bus
trundles past the big windows showing us that we are in London, this type of
hinting in films I find particularly affective; if you’re not looking for it
then you don’t register it.
We follow Theo as he leaves the coffee shop and ventures out
into the street, he turns left after the door but the camera goes right to give
us a view Baby Diego face on the side of an electronic billboard. At this point
we still don’t actually know the real reason as to why there aren’t any other
people under the age of 18. Theo pauses just outside the coffee shop to put his
cup down for a moment while he fishes out a bottle from his inside coat pocket.
We see him to begin to pour something from the bottle into his coffee, but not
for long as the camera then pans left so that Theo’s back is shielding our view
of the bottle as he finishes pouring and we see his arms moving to screw the lid
back on. I like this technique as we don’t actually know for sure what it was
he poured into his drink, from the shape of the bottle we are led to believe
that it was some form of whisky, this opens a whole array of new questions such
as why is he drinking what does he want to forget? I like this kind of hinting
as we don’t know everything but we can begin to make assumptions and guesses as
to what is wrong with him, and later we find out.
But our attention is quickly pulled away from Theo as the
coffee shop that he was just in explodes in a ball of flames. Everyone standing
near the shop falls to the floor and all the traffic stops, the sound of the
explosion created a ringing as if we were really there. The camera then gets
carried towards what is left of the shop and then as the smoke clears a girl
emerges holding here severed left arm in her right arm. The screaming and
ringing continues as the screen goes blank and the film title fills the screen.
Over all I like this opening as it incorporates lots of
small simple effects such as only using two shots for the whole of the opening
with one of them being a cut away to see what’s on the TV but other than that,
the scene is uninterrupted giving a sense of realism into the opening.
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