Taken 2 is an action thriller film directed by Olivier Megaton which stars a wide international cast including Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace, Famke Janssen and Rade Šerbedžija. It is the sequel to the 2008 film Taken. The narrative revolves around retired CIA operative Bryan Mills. The narrative of the film is based around Bryan, his daughter Kim and his ex-wife Lenore getting abducted by a group of Albanese human traffickers, but Kim escapes and is the only hope that Bryan has to escape and save Lenore.
The purpose of the opening sequence is to:
- Introduce the audience to the antagonist and to communicate his motives.
- Communicate some narrative enigmas to the audience that they want answers for.
The opening shot of the extract is a high angle bird’s eye view shot of a truck that acts as an establishing shot. There are also super imposed titles in the bottom right corner telling us that the film is set in Albania. This instantly creates narrative enigmas as Albania is not a particularly well known and developed country nor are films normally set there.
The editing at this point is very slow paced with numerous high angle long shots clearly shot from a helicopter along with some ground level tracking shots following the truck as it drives through the mountain. As the truck drives through the isolated mountains that are clearly far from civilisation an early narrative enigma is created for the audience as you want to know what is in the back of the truck underneath the cover and where they could be going with this as it looks as if it is not a very populated area.
There is a hard cut to a new scene and the music stops at this point clearly where the truck was heading. You know this as the funeral that is happening is at the top of a mountain and the truck was driving up a mountain previously. A number of techniques are combined to signify to the target audience that this film is not set in a location that we are used to as the, language, clothing and rituals all are very unusual for the people that would be watching this film.
As one of the men at the funeral goes to pick up from dirt from the ground there is a close up off a tattoo on his hand, this connotes to the audience that he is most likely to be part of some sort of gang. The significance of this is that it is a hint to the audience that this gang is most likely going to play a big part in the film and also that there is going to be a lot of violence throughout.
As the mourning people are conducting the funeral there is a side on close up of one of the men. The camera then pans to the left of frame to reveal a new character. After this man has been revealed the camera starts to complement him as he increasingly starts do dominate the screen time signifying his importance. The man then starts to explain to us through a temporal manipulation of clips from the previous film what happened in that film and how he wants to have his revenge on the protagonist Bryan Mills. The dialogue explaining how he wants to have revenge connotes to us that he is clearly the main antagonist.
The main narrative enigma that the opening sequence presents to the audience is how the antagonist plans to execute his revenge and if he will succeed or not.
Post By:
Josh Barrett
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