Final movie review- green mile

       For my final film critique of the semester, I decided to watch The Green Mile, directed by Frank Darabont and based off of the book by the same name written by Stephen King. The movie is about a man, John Coffey, who is convicted of the murder of two young girls when he is found holding them. He is sent to death row where he meets the head guard Paul Edgecomb. Although everyone is initially afraid of John because of his imposing size and the crime that he has been accused of committing, as time goes on they learn that John has magical powers that can help to heal people and their opinions on him start to change.

       This was definitely one of the best movies that I have ever watched. Right from the very beginning, the part of the film that stood out was the shots that they got. Most of the shots are not overly cinematic, they tend to be pretty straight on with minimal movement, but they are brilliantly composed. They use the rule of thirds for almost all of the shots, and what they have in the shots is always very thought out. They use it a lot with light in the other thirds. Putting in very harsh light to the side of the actors are used to convey emotion. Lighting is always a good tool to try and convey emotion, but I found that the bright flashing light that they used was much more effective to convey how shockingly horrible that many of the scenes are. There is one scene in particular where I think that this is used very well. Part of John’s abilities is that he is highly empathetic, he can feel the way that the people around him are feeling. During the film, there is an execution that goes horribly wrong. They set it up so that it is during a thunderstorm, and as John feels the pain, the lighting is used to create really harsh flashes of light that line up with when you can see clearly that he is in pain. They use lights busting and the sparks raining down to a very similar effect. Another piece of the cinematography that I found really interesting was how they made John look so much bigger than Paul. Initially, I assumed that Michael Clarke Duncan, the actor who played John was significantly taller than Tom Hanks who plays Paul. After I googled it though I realized that Tom Hanks is over six feet tall and Michael Clarke Duncan is the same height as me. After I realized that and I kept watching the film I noticed that they always film John from a very low angle, a lot of the time not even showing his head and they always film Paul from a higher angle which gives you the illusion that John towers over him when in reality he is only a few inches taller. I think that they also built John a shorter cell than the other prisoners because when his cell is filmed from the outside, you cannot even see his shoulders and the cells for the other cells always look much taller than they are.

       I would definitely recommend this film. It is one of the best films that I have ever seen. I had already read the book, so I knew what was going to happen, but the way that it was filmed and the script made sure that there was plenty of suspense. The film is over three hours long, and it needs to be. By dragging it out some and slowing the film down, they build suspense and it makes the ending so much more emotional.