127 Hours Poster Analysis

 127 Hours Film Poster

 

When the audience first look at this poster, they have reason to be intrigued as they can see an aesthetically pleasing optical illusion as the coming together of cliff edges visually and metaphorically symbolize a timer. This contributes to the main theme of the advert, which is losing time, as it emphasizes the meaning of the text ‘127 HOURS’ and ‘every second counts’. The cliff edges also help to set up a narrative moment in the advert as we can see a man who appears to show little movement is stuck. This foreshadows aspects of the plot in the film teasing the audience, film posters often do this in order to give the audience something the associate the film with and to see if the film’s visual representations of genre and narrative suite to their taste.

The text at the top of the advert ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ obliges the audience to associate this film with an incredibly successful and well-known film as soon as they see the text. The poster does this to prompt the audience on to go and see the film, which is of course the main aim of the poster.

The lighting in the advert also generates a meaning about the film’s narrative. There is a strip of intensely bright light across the centre of the poster and the charachter in the advert. This symbolises the intense part of the plot as giving away the fact that it has an element of the action  genre.

By Colin Chadwick