Sucker Punch's Opening Sequence

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The first scene of the opening sequence is a darkly lit stage, this creates a mysterious effect and the stage makes it seem more like a story or a play than a film. The stage lights up to show the logos, and audio of the second main character is heard, she seems to be whispering which adds to the mysterious effect. Slow, quiet music is heard playing in the background, which makes the atmosphere chilling and gloomy. The curtains lift to show a long shot of the protagonist’s room, it is all still set up like a stage and the character’s back is turned, making her seem trapped. The speaking stops when the camera zooms in for a close up on the protagonist’s face and lyrics from the music is heard, we can see she is shaking and she has a terrified look on her face, the stage is no longer seen and the room looks like an ordinary bedroom, it is raining outside and the lighting is still dark, this is to show the audience that it’s going to be a rather dark and sinister film, the protagonist is showing signs of fear, which tells the audience that something bad will or has happened to her. A middle shot shows a doctor in the hallway shaking his head; this is a quick edit as he is an unimportant character. The protagonist runs out the room, she is shown to be much smaller than the doctor, this shows that she is very weak in the situation. For the rest of the sequence it’s all in slow motion to make it dramatic and so we can see all the emotions on each character. When there is a close up outside the window, we can hear a cry from the protagonist and her sister, everything being said in this sequence is off-camera so they do not distract us by speaking. A middle shot shows us that the protagonist’s sister has entered the room and there is a close up of their knees as they fall to the ground, in these shot they very close to each other, this shows a strong relationship. The music gets louder and, there is an extreme close up of the sister’s hand and a close up of a corpse’s face as the sheets are taken off her, this shows that the corpse was an important character to the protagonist and the lightning makes her face light up for a second, which makes her seem like the only good thing in the protagonist’s is gone, this makes the scene very dramatic and tragic.