What Makes a Great Film?

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What Makes a Great Film?

With movies, you are able to travel back in time and explore unknown eras. If you rather race ahead of your century, they can also hurl you into the future. You can easily become indulged in a mystery, fall in love in a romance, test your fright in a horror, or make the scientific impossible possible in a science fiction. Movies are movies. They provide entertainment by immersing people into an imaginary world. However, these movies or films need to have certain qualities in order to provide this form of entertainment and to be notable. Hence, these qualities would have to contribute in making a great film. This would point to the question of what is it that really makes a great film.

Firstly, one of the qualities that can truly contribute in the making of a great film is a strong cast. It would seem the case that in order for a film to be prominent, a fine story should be the main priority. However, with strong actors and actresses in a film, they are capable of transforming even a tedious storyline in an attention grabbing story. This can be said by being done with the actors being at tune with the characters they portray. When this is done, characters themselves would seem to stand out in a film. Hence, it can be said that distinctive characters would have the tendency to make a story interesting, and they would usually appeal to an audience by being unique. For instance, in the classical 1947 movie, “A Street Car Named Desire”, strong emotional scenes were seen in the majority of the movie. However, a cast of fine actors was responsible for bringing the characters to life. As a result, this movie achieved four Oscars in the actors’ category alone. In addition, in this movie, actor Marlon Brando so skillfully portrayed his character with his flawless performance, that he left an indelible mark on audiences. Hence, this goes to show that a strong cast is one factor in making a movie grand.

Secondly, as with actors bringing characters to life, a movie needs a dominant director to bring it to life. Generally, the role of the director is to set or put in the scenes of the film. In order to make the film distinguished, a powerful director is able to combine skillfully the elements or features that make up a scene. This includes the action, composition, sets and props, lighting, costumes, and make up. These things can be said ...

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...es. Even though these images would appear real, they need to be accompanied by a certain coolness feature in order to be convincing. An example of this is the Matrix movies, which if it wasn’t for its coolness effect, would not have attracted audiences, and hence be classed as great movies. This shows that the special effects of the past and those of the present, has greatly changed the way we define a great film.

In conclusion, it is worth stating that there are certain characteristics that stand out in a great film. For one, there should be a strong cast and a dominant director. With these two aspects, the standard of a film is greatly increased. Also the musical score and special effects added to a film, can raise the plateau in making it notable. It can also be seen that the criteria for making a film great, has changed over the years. What once made a film stand out in the past, doesn’t make it at present. However, this generally goes to the special effect features. Nevertheless, it can be said overall, that all these characteristics resulted in the creation of a great film, in ground breaking style and as a result, this has helped us define cinema or a film as we know it.

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