To what extent do you feel Baz Luhrmann is successful in making Romeo & Juliet accessible to a modern audience?

        A bit later on the camera shows a statue of Jesus starting off with a medium close-up shot and rapidly zooming out to show two skyscrapers on either side. One of the skyscrapers is Capulet and the other one is Montague. This shows the separations between the families, the power they possess and their importance in the city. This is a very clever film technique used by Baz Luhrmann. He zooms out the camera very rapidly to grab the audience’s attention. When someone sees something very fast it immediately grabs their attention and they want to see what is going on. He has used the zooming technique to show the contrast between the two families.

        Religion has quite a lot of impact on this frame because religion is supposed to bring people together. However, the statue is shown with scaffolding around it to reflect the fact that religion is not as strong as it used to be.

        The skyscrapers, modern buildings and helicopters are used in the film to make it more appealing to a modern audience. This will appeal to a modern audience because they can identify it with their everyday life and will develop interest in the film. The helicopter is shown for another reason, which is to tell the audience that the violence is so severe that there needs to be helicopters to control it. The violence makes us think about the enmity between the two families.

        After that the camera flies through the skyscrapers to show us a glimpse of Verona Beach very swiftly. This swift feeling should be very familiar to young people. They are going to relate this to flight simulator games and feel that they are part of it. They will feel excited because of the speed as usually modern audiences like swift and fast activities relating to their advanced fast gaming on their consoles.

        Baz Luhrmann uses the image of fire burning photos of the two families. This creates an image of destruction. Fire is a very powerful element and it is effective here because it shows that there are a lot of battles, destruction and chaos in Verona Beach and that the two families just want to get rid of each other. This is because an ancient grudge that has gone on and on. This can be stopped by forgetting what has happened in the past and starting the relationship between the families fresh. But they do not understand this and are determined to follow the footsteps of their ancestors.

        Original quotes from the prologue such as ‘Civil blood makes civil hands unclean’ are shown by Baz Luhrmann as newspaper headlines. The modern audiences think of newspaper headline to be serious and so they will take this incident to be something, which is of importance relating to their ordinary life. This creates flashing images in audiences mind and drills the message to their brain so that they don’t forget the situation.

There is a picture of a member of Capulet family holding two guns and pointing at a member of Montague family who is also holding guns instead of swords. The transformation of guns from swords is significant because guns is something the modern audience can relate to as being a violent weapon while swords are going to be boring and useless to them. The modern audience relate to guns as being more violent than swords because nowadays most violent activities are done using guns. This shows us the how much the families dislike each other. It is like having a cat and a mouse in one house, both of them hate each other and one wants to get rid of the other one, similarly Capulet and Montague both hate each other and one wants to get rid of the other one.

         Using the helicopter to show the violence, Baz Luhrmann gives us a bird’s eye view of the city. This is effective because the camera is always moving, which reflects the chaotic atmosphere of the city. Bird’s eye view also shows us an overall view of the setting and has been used in the film to show distant fires, people running around and destruction. Baz Luhrmann shows us this quick view of the city to make us realise that the city is feuding in war between two sides and to show it effectively he does it quickly with the camera always moving.

        The soundtrack used by Baz Luhrmann in the opening sequence has an impact in the film because it relates to the situation and gives a feeling that we are part of the action. In this film Baz Luhrmann uses a constant music. The fast music shows us the fact that there is tension and fast activities going on and the situation is very chaotic. He also uses certain sound effects to help us relate the sound with the music. These sound effects include the police siren, gunshots, people shouting, helicopters and fire burning. All the sound effects are essential and they add on to the kind of situation the audiences feel they are in.

        The kind of audience Baz Luhrmann has targeted for this film is a modern one. This film is made for the youngsters of the modern age, it helps them feel more involved in Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet and also develop an interest in them about the play.

        The film would appeal to the audience because of the modern images such as skyscrapers, modern swift camera angles and shots, modern fast soundtrack and sound effects such as police siren, gunshots and also modern proms such as guns, helicopters and police cars are natural to them. All these devices would leave the new generation thinking Romeo and Juliet isn’t that boring after all.

        I think that Luhrmann has very successfully adapted the text for a modern audience whilst remaining faithful to Shakespeare’s original text making it accessible to a modern audience to a very high extent.