Space balls movie opening

 

The opening to the movie “space balls” not a lot happens which is interesting from a viewer’s standpoint, the expectation being the empty time would have been filled with titles but instead they just do a very long establishing shot of the spaceship in which the antagonists live on. I feel the opening has been made boring on purpose to give the viewer a sense of the type of comedy that will be in this movie as well as giving them time to settle down almost and get ready and what not. It ends with a slow image showing the back of the spaceship reading “we stop for no one” the ship is shown moving extremely slow meaning this could be placed there for satirical reasons. The effect of this shot being so long is it builds up tension and for someone that doesn’t know a lot about the movie wouldn’t be sure if it was a comedy or a straight rip off of star wars which means the viewer wants to stay and watch the remainder of the film in order to answer this question. I have chosen this intro as it can be seen as particular bad and I feel it’s good to take notes and not to take notes from it showing not every opening is a good opening. There is no character development nor is the scene and genre of the movie set in the first two minutes which is the main focus of our task.

The clip uses minimal sound, only the sound of the non-diegetic music can be heard for the first thirty seconds or so, this builds up tension making the viewer want to see more but by they are unable to as the scene purposely takes ages to develop. From this we can understand this film will be mostly sarcastic and not serious as opposed to actual star wars where the majority of the film is serious this one will clearly be satirical. There is nothing in the background other than open space, I think this is done on purpose so the focus of the shot is to capture the ships size, there is a joke shortly after this scene asking if Darth Vadar is compensating for something showing they perfectly set up jokes and further shows this film is purely satirical and not to be taken seriously. There isn’t much editing in this opening other than at the very end where it begins to tell us actors names. This is to let the viewer know this is a parody movie and not much money has gone into the creation of it. We don’t see actors in the opening scene therefore we don’t get a great view of the mise-en-scene but from what we have seen we can tell it’s not going to be Oscar winning as it is indeed a parody movie