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| Our protagonists engage the rabid birds for the first time... with coat hangers. |
Note: This report does contain spoilers, in case you actually care. Spoiler alert: This movie's plot isn't exactly what I'd call "riveting."
This establishing shot around halfway into the movie shows a calm world, one right before the proverbial storm (of birds).
The horizontal, parallel lines are the least dynamic and intense lines. The story is devoid of conflict, and these lines reinforce that. It does not enhance the theme of the film, but it contrasts with what's to come...
There are many CGI birds flying among various different tracks. One flock flies in a straight line from left to right (represented by the broken line), and an identical flock flies the opposite direction shortly after. The third picture shows that other birds are flying in circles, flying towards the viewer, and dive bombing. With all of these lines put together, there is little to no sense of order. There is only chaos. This is the contrast I alluded to in the last section. It's exactly the same shot, but with 300% more birds. This is where the world goes to hell.
Next, we find our protagonists in bed after a wild night of implied sex. They're both parallel with the sides of the bed, further establishing order, despite the hell outside of the confines of the safe motel room.
The next shot shows our female protagonist, Nathalie, about to discover what dangers are lurking outside. We can see all of the square shapes. Together, they create a affinity of shape. Also notice all of the parallel lines, further establishing this room as a "safe house" with its implied sense of order.
After Rod and Natalie meet up with survivors Ramsey and Becky, they attempt to stave them off with wire hangers. The yellow lines represent the directions each character swung his hanger. The diagonal line is the most intense orientation of line. The black lines in this shot are showing the virtual lines of eyesight between Rod, Ramsey, and the belligerent birds. All of these diagonal lines are supposed to add a sense of intensity and action.
On the road, Rod finds an orphaned child barricaded underneath a van. She is visually boxed in by the horizon line and the car, giving a sense of temporary safety for the girl. Think of it as a sense of solace in a hellish world. At least, it would seem more hellish if the VFX crew was passable.
The birds attacking the protagonists are usually well-organized. This particular flock is in a square. Bruce Block describes the square as a basic shape. Is the director trying to tell us that the birds are smarter than we think? The world may never know.
Was this filmed as a Dutch angle out of a stylistic decision or simple cinemagraphic incompetence? Probably the latter. Nevertheless, this shot shows Nathalie's vertical axis contrasting with the mostly horizontal lines in the van. The diagonal lines attempt to create a sense of intensity when there's none in the scene.
When the birds arrive once more, they do so in a forest. The bird's path is straight towards the viewer, but if you were to draw lines, they would spread out diagonally from their origin. The use of flat space keeps us focused on the birds, and the contrast in lines builds tension for the ensuing violence.
When the protagonists stop for lunch, we find them in a return to normalcy. Everything is calm, and above all, there are no birds. All of the parallel lines reinforce this. The fact that all of the characters' axes are parallel shows a newfound sense of unity after all they've been through.
In this scene, Rod and Nathalie find a mysterious masked man on a bridge, one who warns them to stay away due to contaminated bird corpses. This shot has numerous lines of different qualities. The bridge has straight lines, but the water and plant life create many curved lines, which add a sense of romanticism to this harmless, idyllic scene.
This next scene shows a computer-generated bird taking the life of Becky somehow. If only the eagle would kill her in a more graceful situation. She shouldn't have died defecating on the ground. The eagle takes a slightly curved horizontal path against the vertical Becky, creating a point of impact, highlighted in red. These intersecting lines create conflict, resulting in an untimely death.
"Those people on the bus are being attacked by birds!" Right you are, Ramsey. Each of the captives are in their own window, each of which are boxes, visually trapping each person. The bus is a jail, each window is a cell, and the birds are the wardens. What a metaphor. If anything, it enhances the sense of desperation the captives are feeling.
After Ramsey neutralizes the wardens, he breaches the jail to rescue the captives, against their wishes ("Don't! The birds will kill us!). Inside of the bus, there's even more squares, which before, signified each "cell." Now, Ramsey is boxed in by the wall of the bus, which may mean that he is trapped. No matter what he does now, his fate is sealed.
If Ramsey learned anything from the former captives, it's "Don't! The birds will kill us!" Of course, it's too late for Ramsey and company, because they're dead. They were killed by... bird acid. Each character is standing straight and vertical, while the "bird acid" is coming in diagonally. Like Becky's death, these crossing paths create conflict resulting in a slow, agonizing, and untimely death.So, what have we learned? After analyzing many shots of a 30-minute segment of one of the worst movies of all time, I'm not too sure. It's hard to tell whether the visual motifs in the movie were placed deliberately or by accident. To me, the only one that's most likely to be a deliberate motif is the bus and jail metaphor. While some motifs were established, none of them contributed to the overarching message of climate change. Most of the motifs I noticed had to do with either conflict or safety. While it was challenging to find visual motifs in such a shoddily-made film, my searches, thankfully, did not end in vain.
