Analyzing and Comparing the Mise-en-scene of David O'Russel's Three Essay

Analyzing and Comparing the Mise-en-scene of David O'Russel's Three Kings to Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan - Essay Example David O’Russell knew the power of setting a story during the time of war, thus he came up with the most finely tuned, eccentrically conventional film Three Kings. Both Saving Private Ryan and Three Kings have effectively shown war in a resolute way that serves similar aims but achieves this in different manners. O’Russell’s Three Kings clearly uses the narrative device of an ethical story to relate the Gulf War’s moral lessons as well as to rewrite America’s ethical position over the people of Iraq through revising what was viewed as a moral defeat. The film tells a narrative of a gang of four U.S fighters on operations at the Gulf at the end of the dispute as they find out a map to one of the secrete bunkers of Saddam Hussein, containing huge amounts of Kuwait gold, and plan to steal it for their own gains. On the other hand, Steven Spielberg has been criticized for failing to employ narrative action basing on the moral and national purpose in his film Saving Private Ryan. This criticism can be understood in the perspective of the constraints placed on modern cinematic stories of war by the Vietnam syndrome (Andersen 193). Even though Three Kings is developed around a definitely American-based fictional plot, this film typically aims to bring in issues concerning Iraq and addresses it to a certain extent as the film develops. On the other hand, Saving Private Ryan tries to reillusion American national distinctiveness in the wake of Vietnam by presenting a more distant past. The specific ethical justification for starting war and admitting its sacrifices and horrors is found in ethical campaigns against the Nazi plot of Holocaust. Through stitching the Holocaust into the movie, the film takes part in ‘Americanization’ of a memory of Holocaust, avoids Vietnam as a source of distressing memory, produces a redemptive national uniqueness, and constructs a moral usable past in the present. In both films, the use of ima gery has been clearly utilized. Saving Private Ryan starts and ends with a shot of a flag that is faded and desaturated of color. The red colors have turned to pink, white to gray, and the blue colors have lost their color completely. The flag is transparent, moving forth and back in the centre of a cool dusk as the sunlight penetrates straight through it. The reason behind this is that the flag symbolizes a lost time and a fading generation. The American elites who fought to keep such banners were gone and the film was developed for their sake. Such features show that Saving Private Ryan may be the greatest film ever produced about horror and heroism in war situations. It shows how heroic conduct can be unusually difficult, impulsive, lucky, instinctive, and deliberate, all at once. In contrast, Three Kings had mixed receptions on its release. In general, reviews involved praise for technical elements of the film as well as criticism of the way the Gulf War was presented. In the Wa shington Post, Stephen Hunter claimed the style of the film had the feeling second to none, as it re-imagines the past war movie post-modernly. He further concludes that the film was ideologically unremarkable. Similarly, Three Kings uses some sort of imagery in the storyline. At the start of the scene, a discussion goes on between Major Gates and his Staff Sergeant, standing near a helicopter. The image of a helicopter was used as an icon in this film, though not frequently used outside the scene (Andersen 194). At the beginning, when a shot cuts through, it is obvious that the positioning of the characters is to enable the blade to remain at the heart of the screen, right between the