Scene Analysis: X-Men First Class

AS Film Studies – Scene Analysis

The scene I will analyse has come from Marvel Entertainment's 2011 film X-Men: First Class. Directed by Matthew Vaughn, the film starts with the main antagonist, Sebastian Shaw, murdering Erik's mother. This gives Erik motive for the rest of the film, find and kill Sebastian Shaw. In New York, a young Charles Xavier meets a new mutant, mystique, and invites her into his house. Charles then dedicates his life to be a professor on mutations, upon graduating Oxford he is met and recruited by CIA agent Moira MacTaggert where he is need to help against a mutant threat to the USA, Sebastian Shaw. Through this common enemy Erik and Charles meet and recruit various new mutants to a team in which they will fight the opposing Shaw whilst also preventing the break out of a world war three. The scene I will analyse is when Erik travels to Argentina in the hopes of finding Shaw, or Schmidt as Erik knows him. Erik goes to a bar to which he notices a picture of Shaw and two men, these two men are with Erik in the bar. Upon engaging in conversation Erik sits with the German men and slowly reveals to these assumed Nazis that his parents died during the holocaust and he is a survivor. The men try to kill him but by using his magnetic powers Erik kills them instead.
Microfeatures are the features within a film that work together to communicate the meaning of a film to the audience. One of the main microfeatures is mise-en-scene as in includes so much such as the props and the scenery, the costumes, lighting, the positioning of everything within the scene and body language of the characters, the other microfeatures are cinematography which focuses on   the camera work, there is also editing, the alteration and arranging of the filmed content and finally sound, the noise, score or soundtrack.
The mise-en-scene of this scene holds great significance. The setting is a bar in Argentina; this setting is perfect as it is well known that after world war...