Action Film Deconstruction

Action Film Deconstruction: The Raid: Redemption

Lighting
The use of low key lighting helps to portray the importance of the character we find out to be the main character this coupled with the use of hard light shows the details of his body structure highlighting that is only by his hard work that will help him over come his challenges.
When his wife is shown laying on the bed the light changes to soft key (chiaroscuro)  which suggests how important his wife is to him, and how her life as a mother and a wife is contrasted to his life as police man. This is typical of action films as the main character finds themselves fighting and surviving because of the family they are trying to raise.



Sound

All of the sounds in this scene are diegetic, as it is an action film they are all over emphasised but they are only the sound of his heavy breathing and the impact of his hands on what he is doing. However the absence of sound when his mouth is moving connotes that his voice has less importance than his fists, although not many realise it but many action films lack explicit conversational dialogue, and many action film veterans cannot act very well in anything else but action films.
There is no use of non-diegetic sound, like music, whilst music is said to create an ambience by not using it there is a sort of empty ambience created





Camera Movement

When Rama is using the punching bag to train the use of handheld camera movement helps to emphasise how fast he is punching because it makes his hands hard to follow, as an action film this is a useful technique as it is used to make the protagonist look extremely powerful and skilled . It also suggests that as a police man this type of training is an everyday occurrence as handheld camera movement can also connote a sense of reality in a scene.


Although most action movies begin with an establishing shot, either an aerial shot dolly shots or a crane shot  of the general area the film is taking place. For a film like this it works to have eye level shots so that we are able to identify with the life of our main character and those he is trying to protect.

Mise en scene