Cate Blanchett’s character in The Shipping News clashes with that of Kevin Spacey’s because their personalities are so dissimilar. Cate Blanchett appears to be quite careless and free-spirited, whilst her husband is portrayed as the opposite. Spacey’s characters’ personality is reflected in Newfoundland, which is intensely isolated and bland, and the audience’s first impressions of the surroundings would be negative. At the beginning of the trailer for The Shipping News, Cate Blanchett leaves her husband without a trace which leaves him feeling alone and downcast, this is why I believe he and his family went to Newfoundland to start a future, because the setting was well adapted to his mood.
The weather in the trailer for The Day After Tomorrow differs from that of The Shipping News because of the intensity of it. I also believe the cause of this is because of the film genre, The Shipping News doesn’t seem to have much of a fixed genre, or not one that you can distinguish from the trailer, whereas The Day After Tomorrow is a disaster movie, which makes the film need to be more excessive. The weather in The Shipping News isn’t too drastic because wherever the film is set is meant to have that climate, whereas The Day After Tomorrow is out of the ordinary and very exaggerated, and this is made more obvious by the way a lot of news reporters are featured on the trailer, exclaiming about the weather. This footage is what excites the audience, how the reporters are right in the midst of the storms and twisters and you can see all the carnage and destruction happening around them. This is very different from that of The Shipping News where everything is so calm and tranquil.
I believe that The Day After Tomorrow is the more believable of the two storylines, simply because it has happened once and can inevitably happen again, when in fact The Shipping News seems almost desultory and random compared.
Out of the two storylines I empathise more with the father in The Day After Tomorrow, because of his evident helplessness and determination, and just because his character in general seems more compassionate than any of those in The Shipping News, all of which seem fairly unaffected by their surroundings.
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