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The before and afters of an apocalypse in the movies usually has the post-event world looking desaturated, burnt out, drained of color. Not so Station Eleven which flips that convention on its head.
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In the 10-episode series that just finished on HBO Max the
apocalypse results from a flu that has no incubation period and causes
near-immediate death.
In adapting Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel writer and
showrunner Patrick Somerville (The Leftovers) traced three story
worlds — a Traveling Shakespearean troupe; a cult of kids, led by the prophet
Tyler (Daniel Zovatto); and a group of survivors living in an airport.
The series alternates between past and present timelines to
show the pivotal hours leading up to the crisis, the immediate aftermath, and
those who have adapted to the new circumstances of their world twenty years
later.
This could be a set up for a “puzzle-box” of elements that
fire up fan communities in shows like I, Robot, Westworld and
Yellowjackets but Station Eleven side steps this.
“It isn’t that the post-apocalyptic drama doesn’t supply
answers—it does, in increasingly rewarding layers as it unfolds—but rather that
the questions that really matter can’t be addressed through plot mechanics,”
suggests Lili Loofbourow in a review at
Slate. “We are not interested in how the pandemic started, or who engineered it, or
even how exactly it works. We don’t even especially need to know the
particulars of the ‘Station Eleven’ graphic novel within the show.
What matters far more is the feeling the book creates and what that feeling
does.”
That feeling is evoked most strongly in an aesthetic that
acts an antidote to the dour color palette and mood of other post-apocalyptic
motion picture narratives on television and in film.
“Laced with humor and heartache, it's perhaps the brightest,
most fanciful end-of-the-world drama you'll ever see,” says Slashfilm.
While Polygon insists that the “Beautiful, lush cinematography gives scenes a sense of
contemporaneousness — resisting the dour tones that often mark the
apocalypse genre.”
The visual (production design + cinematographic) concept was
have the present feel like the future, and the future to feel like the past.
“In many ways, we were trying to invert the post-apocalyptic
genre,” Somerville tells Vox, “Hiro Murai [who directs the pilot] always said he wanted to be there when we
were talking about year 20 [after the plague that kills most of humanity].
Quiet, big, expansive, beautiful, green. Not destroyed. Just still.”
In postproduction the filmmakers actually deemphasized
color in scenes set before the apocalypse.
“Year 20 is very naturally lit with lots of bright sunlight
and lots of colorful greens and flora and lots of saturation,” explains DP
Christian Sprenger who set the series look with Murai in the pilot. “We wanted
that world to feel welcoming, and we wanted to push against that concept of
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road’s very gross, dirty, almost monochromatic
future, that sad apocalypse aesthetic. Where that led us was that year zero,
the world we’re currently living in, wanted to feel a little bit more subdued
and slightly desaturated.”
He added to xxx that they chose locations that had
artificial lighting; subway stations, a theater, even the streets at night.
“Everything has this stark, manmade aesthetic. We intended to let that be what
the sci-fi future aesthetic normally feels like. And when you jump forward to
the future, that almost feels like 200 years ago.”
Sprenger told the LA
Times that the inspiration for shooting ALEXA Mini Large Format was to help tell a
story “about a few seemingly insignificant people up against these giant
man-made and eventually natural landscapes. This idea led us down the path of
putting our small little characters against these large-scale wide frames —
feeling the contrast of scale to significance.”
Station Eleven is not the only show to imagine the
post-apocalypse in a vidid color palette. Mad Max: Fury Road, for
instance, is full of crisp blues and burnt yellows, highlighting its desert
setting. I Am Legend and The Walking Dead have
been set in worlds where greenery has overtaken what once were human spaces.
“What sets Station Eleven apart is its
willingness to push those vibrant colors to an extreme,” says Emily VanDerWerff
at Vox. “Every time the series drops us into a world where humanity is
rebuilding, despite the devastation of the Georgia Flu, that world feels almost
inviting.”
Costume designer Helen Huang picks up the theme: “A large
part of this project is about optimism and memory,” she says. “Those two things
also spark color, because if you look at our world as it is now, if you took
away all the people in it, it’s full of color. It’s full of graphics. It’s a
memory of our civilization. It creates this world that’s separate from all the
other language of the post-apocalyptic world that’s out there.”
Steve Cosens, who shot four episodes says that his direction from Somerville was to depict a future that was not
daunting.
“Even though we're in this kind of post-apocalyptic,
post-pandemic world, he wanted nature to feel that it's friendly. It's not like
some of these other post-pandemic or post-apocalyptic shows where nature is all
burnt out and kind of scary. There would still be some lyricism in the design
of the sets or there would be pops of color.”
The color vibe aside, there’s another ray of hope that
Station Eleven radiates – that of basic human connection. Instead of going all
‘Lord of the Flies’ or selfish rogue as element of humanity are often portrayed
in the aftermath of (zombie)geddons like 28 Days Later or A Quiet
Place II, Station Eleven eases those
psychic blows by saturating its plotlines with “excessive, frankly rococo”
connections, says Loofbourow.
“The show isn’t following some supernatural principle
according to which everyone in its universe is connected. Rather, it makes it
seem that the reason we’re hearing this particular set of stories
is because they are connected. Station Eleven is obviously
and unsubtly interested in art—art as artifice, art as authenticity, and art as
a preserver of civilization that stands in opposition to civilization’s less
savory aspects.”
ends
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