Steven Spielberg’s movies

Movie director, screenwriter and producer, Steven Spielberg definitely revolutionized the cinema industry of his time. He directed so many movies it is starting to be hard to name them all: Jaws, Jurassic Park, E.T the Extra-Terrestrial, Indiana Jones, The Colour Purple, War of the Worlds… So many different movies in which we can find similarities and differences.

There are some topics and elements that you can find in every Steven Spielberg’s movie. Let me tell you three of them, the most obvious ones.

First of all, in every movie Spielberg directed he shows his own personality. Steven Spielberg’s parents’ divorce really affected him (he was 19 when it happened). In many Spielberg movies, like Indiana Jones, Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Jurassic Park, fatherhood is something feared, avoided and run away from during the whole movie until the end of it, when they finally find answers to their issues. It is definitly an important subject for the director. He even once said that had he been a father at the time, he would have thought twice about having the main character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind abandon his family so quickly.

Then, the lighting is also something you can find in every Spielberg’s movie. The director has always relied on intense lighting, from above or outside. He loves streams of light. In the 1990s, Spielberg worked with the cinematographer Janusz Kaminki. At that time, his movies have become more frequently full of interior scenes characterized by their backlit windows, with streams of light that pour in and leave the characters in shape. Spielberg once said that the shot in Close Encounters of the Third Kind of the small boy standing against a doorway blasted out with an alien light is one of the key images of his career: “That beautiful but awful light, just like fire coming through the doorway. [Barry’s] very small, and it’s a very large door, and there’s a lot of promise or danger outside that door.” That way, Spielberg builds up a suspense in each movie he directs.

Now if you listen to the music Spielberg uses in his movies you’ll notice it is something very specific. The music is chosen very carefully. John Williams, the most famous composer of movie music of our days, has worked with Steven Spielberg on each of his films except The Color Purple. His main themes for the Indiana Jones series, Jurassic Park, E.T the Extra-Terrestrial, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Jaws are some of the most memorable of the post-Hollywood blockbuster era (not to mention the Star Wars and Harry Potter films).

There are a lot of other elements you can find in Steven Spielberg’s movies but if you find those elements in a movie, you can be almost sure you’re watching a Spielberg movie.

Spielberg is also very influenced by classic movies, the “black and white movies”. He thinks it is very important to watch movies from the old days, “the black-and-white days” as he calls them from the 30s and 40s. It is important to him, he thinks only studying the movies from the 1970s isn’t a lot because all those movies learnt from “the masters of the 30s and 40s and 50s,” and those movies probably learnt from “the silent movie masters so we’re all handing influences down and inspiring from generation to generation,” he once said in an interview. He also said: “I kind of am a little bit sad a lot of the young people today kind of have a cut-off point for their own personal influences and that’s like they don’t know a lot about the pictures in the pre 60s.”

Now let me tell you about the last movie Spielberg directed, his last blockboster: Ready Player One. The movie is actually an adaptation of Ernest Cline’s novel of the same name. The movie is screenwritten by Ernest Cline and Zak Penn (who co-wrote X-Men: The Last Stand). It is a science fiction movie which takes place in a dystopian world in 2045. Everyone is poor and everyone lives in a virtual reality entertainment universe: the OASIS. In the OASIS you can be whoever you want, and you can do whatever you want. There is a money in the OASIS different from real money so anyone can be rich in virtual reality but poor in actual reality. This is why people love the OASIS so much: you just need to put your virtual glasses on to forget about all your problems. The Oasis was created by James Halliday, a crazy scientist. When Halliday died, a pre-recorded message left by his avatar announces a game: there are keys hidden in the OASIS that permit you to find the Golden Easter Egg. Whoever finds the Golden Easter Egg becomes the owner of the OASIS. That gives the right to that person to either update new games in the OASIS or to close the OASIS. They can do whatever they want with the OASIS, the winner gets a complete control on it, which also means a complete control on the future.

If you are interested in this movie, this is the link of the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSp1dM2Vj48

As a fan of pop culture the director got inspired by it and we can actually find many references to pop culture in the movie. For example: King Kong, the DeLorean from Back to the Future, the gates from Jurassic Park, the logo of Elliott wheeling E.T. in front of the moon, the Dark Knight from Batman, Harley Quinn and the Joker, The Iron Giant, Mad Max, Minecraft, Pac-Man, Rubik’s Cube, The Shinning, etc. The list is very, very long and pop culture is also a specific aspect that comes back in a lot of his movies.

As a conclusion, we can say that Steven Spielberg always succeeds in making us laugh or cry, to scare us and to amaze us in each of his movies.

Emma