Hotel Rwanda

     Alright so here is the actual review:

     The lighting in the film Hotel Rwanda was well done. There are a lot of outdoor scenes, where it looks like maybe natural lighting was used, however, you can also tell that it was messed around with. Most of the scenes look like the lighting was overcast, as if there was a dull storm overhead, waiting to happen. Which, of course, works tremendously for the film because of the message it is portraying. If you look back to one of my recent entries, I had written a poem when we were half-way through the film, and I titled it 'Are we all just numbers?' See, there was genocide happening in Rwanda that finally ended in 1994, which is what the movie is about. It is centralized around a certain family, the man who runs the hotel that has turned into a refugee camp. The costuming stays generally the same throughout the film because most of the people don't have anything left for or to them. But, you can see by the costuming how the characters are ranked differently in society.


     It is extremely hard to pay attention to detail in this movie because of all the action going on at any point. There is some romance during the movie between the main character and his wife, but it is not enough to place the movie in that genre. Mainly, this movie is action and macabre. The set designs are fully comprehensive when you connect with what is going on in the film and realizing that this film is actually based on real events. Many of the sets were actual places that were affected by the Genocide. For the movie, the sets were renovated for the movie so that the actors were safe, however, they were still put through the horror of those torturous memories.


     The editing done for this film was a little shaking in the fact that some of the shots didn't fit well together in the final cut. Which meant that the plot line might have changed a bit. A few bits of the movie seemed to be randomly thrown in because of this small problem, which ruined the film a bit. However, eventually at the end, the film was pulled all together because of the overall problem that was happening during the time. At the same time, it seems as if these extra scenes were necessary to show that things could still be normal and the people affected by the Genocide were still sane, but it was obvious that things would not stay that way because in the very next shot, you go back outside to the hellish world.


     Aside from my review, I wish that people would have gone over and helped but now, something similar is happening in Darfur, which people can do something about. Please do.


     So, until next time--