Lighting: "Commando", 1985

In this week’s lecture we learned about lighting in movies and we watched an action movie from 1985 directed by Mark L. Lester called “commando”.
Our task was to see how lighting was used in the movie and write about it in our blog.
I spent a lot of time during the movie to look at the lighting techniques, so much that it took a while before I realised that there is a lack of good lighting techniques in the movie. In fact there are a lot of mistakes and big parts of the movie seems dark and a lot of details are unclear and confusing.
“Commando” is about a former soldier whose daughter gets kidnapped by gangsters who wants to force John to kill a president for them. But he refuses to do so and starts a long journey and fight where he kills everyone who gets in his way of getting to his daughter. He also gets some help from a flight attendant.
Since this is an action movie I think it is particularly important that the lighting quality is good, because there are a lot of fast, chaotic shooting and to be able to pay attention to where the focus is in the scenes. Although I think some of the problems with the lighting in the movie can be blamed on the fact that it is made in the 80’s where the film-quality probably was a lot lower than what you can expect in movies today.
The scenes that really made me confused about lighting use in the beginning was the scenes in the car-shop, and inside shots in the car in particular. The characters became very dark and had a lot of shadow covering for the face details. I couldn’t see any lighting use in these scenes at all, except from the light shining in from outside.
In the beginning of the movie when Arnold Schwarzenegger is introduced, I noticed how they use the light from the sun in one of the scenes to make a natural backlight on him as he walks on his way home.Another problem with the lighting use in the movie, was that I think it often made the people’s face look very shiny and almost sweaty all the time, Arnold in particular, but maybe this is made intentionally to.
In most of the conversations during the movie I also noticed how the characters face often lay half dark in shadow, and I can’t remember seeing any scenes where there was use of backlight on the characters, or hair light or filling light.
This means that most of the lighting use in the movie probably comes from use of natural lights. Like when Arnold is climbing to get into the warehouse in the end of the movie, I noticed how the scene was lighted up by the natural lighting on the building. I also used the example with having daylight shining in through the windows in scenes taken inside when it is possible. The is one scene where there should be a lot of potential to use natural lighting, but where I still thought the scene seemed a bit dark, and that was the scene in the shopping-mall.
All over my conclusion is that it was a very entertaining action movie, but the lighting use could have been a lot better, especially since it was an action movie, but maybe a lot of it can be blamed on the fact that it was made in the 80’s.