Assasination Nation is a film that has been lingering in my mind for months now since its release November 2018, as soon as I saw this advertisement I ran to HOME Cinema to watch the film and it did not dissapoint, its everything you could want from a film on more, a twist on Feminism. Assasination Nation starts out with a young group of friends living in Salem, one day at school the realisation of a malicious hacker becaomes present and the school goes into meltdown of worrying who's account will be hacked next? they're getting everyone the principle, parents you name it!
This is some social media revenge porn at its peak, The hacker begins exposing secrets of Salem and its town as chaos begins it becomes apparent to the girls that the town has gone mad, Salem turns into a twist on the purge, Lily Colson the main character has been texting a man named "Daddy" this later becomes apparent that she was babysitting a mans daughter and began seeing the man in question, aSalems deadly hacker releases Lilys darkest secrets to the world, One week later we see mad men in ski masks, with guns knifes and any weapons they can find tearing up Salem in order to find Lily.
Lily resides at her best pals house alongside her other two friends, the men eventually break in and this is where we start to see the real feminist kick ass scenes commence, the girls covered in blood, killing men, destroying the town and taking back whats rightfully theres yet not without a fight. This film tackles many aspects of society from Feminism, Transgender, Rape, Social Media, Police gone rogue and Slut shaming.
For me this is everything I'd been searching for in a film, there was many aspects within this film that inspired me the first being colour scheme, the colours throughout are bright and beautiful, bold and stand out from a distance, unlike any other film I've seen Assasination Nation played with the medium of colour grading in such a technical yet perfect way, I feel this film would have been completely different with a standard colour grade. The soundtrack being another aspect that drew me in immediately, leaving you with the feeling that your going to take over the world.
Throughout watching this film I could feel inspiration from films alike Heathers, another film in which has always captivated me theres a clear sense of the 90s coming through within the visuals of this film. The main thing I took away from this film was how social media is a huge part of today contemporary lifestyle, it controls how we live our everyday lives, we act as humans alike this is the norm, but what if this really happened? how would society deal with the real truths hidden within social media and private messaging?
Assasination nation really helped me develop my own skills and I feel I'll take away a lot from this and use within my own filmmaking practise everything from casting, production and editing is truly inspiring to me. For my own personal project in our major film I took a lot of inspiration from the voice over in which Lily presents to us, leading us the story, I've attached the trailer below as an example. Theres something beautiful about dressing your own people Lily states "This the story of how my town Salem lost its mind" opposed to in my film "This towns a shit hole, a dead end, but its our shit hole". I also took inspiration from the social media aspect of this film, the inserts of screenshots etc.
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