Apocalypto

Recently, I had the unfortunate experience of watching Apocalypto by Mel Gibson.  The film follows a young Mayan warrior named Jaguar Paw through a maze of events.  First him and his fellow villagers are forced from there home by a foreign tribe and then he slowly but surely makes his way back to rescue his wife and two kids that he left behind.  I found the film to be terrible, as did the two friends I watched it with, however, the movie did clearly use all 5 film techniques at one point or another.  The scene where Jaguar Paw and his fellow townspeople were forced from there village was a perfect scene to analyze the film techniques being used.  The scene begins with Jaguar Paw peacefully sleeping but slowly suspenseful music begins to build.  At the height of the suspenseful music, the first enemy warrior is seen running by.  From there, the music turns to drums that mimick the footsteps of the attacking warriors running towards the village.  As the enemy warriors are running in, there are many high angles of them to relay a sense of power and intimidation to the viewer.  The director also does a great job of close ups and extreme close ups of the villagers being attacked to show the extreme fear and terror that they are experiencing.  The entire scene the duration of the shots is very short, which creates a feeling of suspense and also a feeling of not knowing where the enemy warriors are coming from.  At the end of the clip, as the villagers are being led away as prisoners, there is use of mis en scene everywhere.  There are shots of burning huts to symbolize the village being destroyed and shots of lost children aimlessly wandering to show all the families that have been destroyed.  Although a bad movie overall, through film techniques the director does a pretty good job of creating a suspenseful, action packed scene.