Mise En Scene in a Professional Film

 I decided to comment on the mise-en-scene of a Netflix show called, “Alice in Borderland”. I made this decision because I really found this show interesting. Alice in Borderland is a manga series created by Haro Aso. The story focuses on Arisu Ryohei, better known as the titular "Alice". In Alice in Borderland, an obsessed gamer finds himself in a barren and distant reality where the players have to play a game and win in order to survive. In Alice in Borderland, the characters emerge in a distant fantasy land called Borderland where the only way to survive is to play games and earn lives. He is a juvenile delinquent with poor luck in life who's nearly finished high school. This show had many different elements that stood out to me therefore choosing this show to write about was a no brainer. In deeper detail, the show starts off as a young man who is jobless and plays videogames all day. As Arisu (the main character) continues to play, different camera angles are shown which represents shallow space. In shallow space, the image appears flat or two dimensional, because there is little or no depth. A few camera angles were a POV of Arius playing an FPS (first person shooter) game, then it switches over his shoulder, and finally it ends up zooming into his controller. As you move through the first few scenes of the movie you will notice that when the players are chosen to play the first game that the lighting is low-key, helping portray a sense of inactivity and sorrow. This emptiness causes the viewers to think about what has happened and leaves them on their toes wondering what will happen next.  In this scene low lighting took place as the characters are chosen everyone in Tokyo disappeared and everything suddenly turned dark. Just these few attributes changed the whole movie. The movie started off as an average sunny day in Tokyo, the streets are packed, families are together, heavy traffic, and people rushing to work. Once Arisu and his befriends cause a car accident for goofing around in the middle of the street, they see police officers and start running so they go hide in a public restroom. As they are hiding, they suddenly hear a weird sound. Once they decide to find out what that one weird sound was, they slowly start to realize that Tokyo was abandoned. The scene of the movie instantly changed from happy to gloomy. Throughout the movie most scenes were portrayed in dark key lighting. Throughout the movie, the sounds have always been changing. The sounds were portrayed as mystery, death, intensity, pain, and even happiness. The movie ends after a long fight. Arisu wins the game, allowing all players to choose to either remain in the game forever or return to real life. Arisu and Usagi decide to go back to the real world, where they learn all Borderland players were injured by space rocks in a meteorite attack on Tokyo. In the end scene there were many close-up shots of all the people that were eliminated as well as Arisu's shocked face.