Scenery Porn/Film/Live-Action Films

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Scenery Porn in Live-Action Films include:

  • Avatar is so completely packed with it from start to finish that the saturated colors and imagery of the alien environment actually outplays everything else.
  • Titanic gives us shots of the exquisitely designed first class areas of the ship. (And jaw-dropping scenes of the same gorgeous rooms being decimated)
  • The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is essentially a movie of Terry Gilliam's wildest scenes imaginable. Pretty.
  • S. Darko has ridiculously good Scenery Porn for an otherwise terrible movie.
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey
  • 2010: The Year We Make Contact made excellent use of the Voyager probes' photographic record of the Jovian system.
  • Same with Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon.[context?]
  • The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert is full of Scenery Porn describing the three protagonists' trip towards Alice Springs. Guilty also of Costume Porn, with both during the climb to Kings Canyon.
  • The Brothers Grimm: Nothing but Scenery Porn. The magical woods were the best part (possibly only good part) of the whole thing.
  • Bram Stoker's Dracula. Studio interiors of Victorian London, especially the rose-filled garden, bathed in rich colours and looked really... fantastic. Great Costume Porn, too.
  • Hammer Horror, namely their Gothic films has sumptuously lush and dazzlingly clean London and Transylvania.
  • Cast Away: There was considerable Scenery Porn in this Tom Hanks vehicle. The film spends a lot of time focusing on how isolated his character is, trapped on the island -- hence there is much time for the camera to celebrate the landscape. Most of the views looking out to sea are CGI-enhanced: the location itself was in the middle of a chain of islands all visible from the beach.
  • Field of Dreams: The producers went out of their way to ensure the most beautiful shots, by building the actual field on two adjoining properties to allow for uninhibited sunset shots, and sometimes breaking a single scene up over several days to ensure "Magic Hour" effects every time, and also by changing the story's setting from Iowa City to the more picturesque Dubuque County.
  • Curse of the Golden Flower is an indoor example which mostly takes place in an opulent Chinese castle overflowing with intricate ornamentation. The film extends the detail to Costume Porn as well.
    • This is true of many Chinese historical dramas on film and TV. A feast for the eyes, you needn't understand the language or what's going on.
  • Terrence Malick ostensibly built his career on Scenery Porn. His movies may either be brilliant explorations of the scope and depth of man's existence or boring as box of rocks. However, no one can doubt the sheer awe-inspiring beauty of his films. See:
  • The Fall, where every frame of the movie could be hung in an art gallery, though most of this is due to being filmed all over the world, rather than set design. In fact, scenery porn seems to be director Tarsem Singh's specialty, considering how much his previous film The Cell has it. Judging from the trailers, his next film, Immortals, will also have it in abundance.
  • The Lord of the Rings. The films are sometimes described as "the best advert the New Zealand Tourist Board ever had".
    • This is directly mocked in Flight of the Conchords. The band's manager is a New Zealand tourism board employee, and his office is full of travel ad posters referencing The Lord of the Rings.
    • From the trailer, it's seems that the prequel to LOTR, The Hobbit, will pretty much follow its footsteps in showing the beautiful landscape of New Zealand.
  • In a surprise move, Eragon forewent the casting of New Zealand and went with dark horse Hungary in a move lauded by critics. Hungary has mountains.
  • The Chronicles of Narnia movies;, again filmed in New Zealand. There's a reason films from New Zealand use this trope though. The Narnia films also had scenes shot in the Czech Republic and elsewhere.
  • Ditto the much older Willow (itself heavily based off The Hobbit) and every fantasy epic since LotR.
  • Star Trek the Motion Picture spends a lot of time on Scenery Porn, to show off the jazzy new SFX and the sleek, new model of the Cool Ship. The theatrical version is especially gratuitous with the Scenery Porn because the film actually wasn't finished when it was released to theaters, so the special effects shots were just edited in without being trimmed down at all. The director's cut tones it down a little (but not entirely).
  • Star Trek III the Search For Spock features a gorgeous shot of a Vulcan temple high in the mountains towards the end of the movie. The establishing shots inside the temple may fall under this trope as well.
  • The Shining begins with a long sequence of a car driving through mountains, because mountains are cool, apparently. This is used to illustrate the seclusion of the hotel, a major Plot Point. It's also this trope in its darkest form, since paired with the soundtrack and the weightless gliding of the camera, it sets a rather ominous mood.
  • Blade Runner: There are many slow pan shots of scenery and buildings. It is hauntingly beautiful. It is high tech. It would suck big time to be there.
  • Another Ridley Scott film: Legend has scenery that, combined with Jerry Goldsmith's Ravel-inspired score, might make you feel woozy with sugar overdose...
  • The Sound of Music. Three solid minutes of beautiful shots of the Austrian mountains, with pretty, birdlike instrumentals in the background, has got to be the definitive example of Scenery Porn.
  • Gus Van Sant's Gerry is pretty much nothing but Scenery Porn.
  • Sunshine: This movie exists solely to show cold green corridors, the molten surface of the sun and alternate between them. Add some epic music and please ignore the characters. We did.
  • In this vein, Under the Tuscan Sun mainly exists to make yuppies think that Tuscany is very, very pretty.
  • While George Lucas is not a very good character director, he does know how to impress with his wide pans over alien landscapes in Star Wars. The Otoh Gunga in The Phantom Menace, Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back, the Death Star, the entire Order 66 scene in Revenge of the Sith, and Coruscant in general in the prequels are good examples that show where he truly excels. (Although the Cloud City Scenery Porn in ESB wasn't really his, Lucas having very little involvement with Episode V compared with the other movies, in the Special Editions where he had a lot more input that sequence was extended.)
  • The parts of the James Bond films that aren't Fan Service or Stuff Blowing Up fall into this category a lot of the time. Examples:
  • The David Niven movie of Around the World in Eighty Days -- including long scenes of the heroes ballooning through the Alps, long parades, and a flamenco dance in Madrid that lasted at least 5 minutes -- and that one was while The Hero was supposed to be in a big hurry!
    • This movie is just one of many from the 1950s-1960s that indulged in this. At the time, the advent of television was pulling enough people from movie theaters that gimmicks like widescreen photography were put into play, and filmmakers needed to fill that space somehow...
    • All of Jules Verne's Les Voyages Extraordinaires are like this, and therefore each corresponding Film of the Book tends to follow suit.
  • The Searchers is full of this.
    • The Western genre in general is prone to this, ranging from John Ford's films (of which The Searchers was just one of many) to New Old West variants like Brokeback Mountain.
      • True Grit is chock-full of this -- big, sweeping shots of beautiful Western scenery.
    • Dances with Wolves is half made of this trope.
    • The Proposition, although the landscape in question is the barren Australian outback. Still beautiful, in its own way.
    • Generally, any film shot outdoors in the American West, the Australian Outback, or New Zealand, will almost inevitably make use of the scenery for at least one establishing shot.
    • Even the comic Western Shanghai Noon is beautiful to look at, with lots of extraneous shots of snow-capped mountains, streams, deserts, plains, etc.
  • For all the Scenery Porn of John Ford's Westerns (thanks to Monument Valley), his non-Westerns such as How Green Was My Valley and The Quiet Man provide tons of it as well.
  • The films of David Lean (especially Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago) are textbook examples of this trope.
  • Just about any Terry Gilliam film fits this trope. In fact, one reason the other members of Monty Python eventually chose Terry Jones to direct the troupe's films was their belief that Gilliam was more concerned with cinematography and set design than with creating comedy.
  • Used gratuitously in Mamma Mia!.
  • The Adventures of Milo and Otis is filled with shots of gorgeous farmland, waterfalls and forests, nicely complemented by adorable puppies and kittens.
  • Tim Burton's films are full of this, with his Batman films a particularly good example. In particular, its depiction of Gotham City is considered one of the most amazing locations depicted in all of film, on the same level of Blade Runner's futuristic Los Angeles or Middle-earth.
  • Joel Schumacher's entries in that series attempted this but were too garish and implausible for their own good.
  • Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Saga largely eschews this as per its more realistic approach to the universe. Although the IMAX shots of Gotham and Hong Kong (as well as Bruce's yacht) are gorgeous.
  • Alice in Wonderland is jam-packed with this.
  • Van Helsing had so much eye candy it outshone many of the movie's actors flaws.
  • What Dreams May Come's title alone suggests how much of the movie is spent just showing off CGI vistas of the afterlife. From a mountain range made out of paint, to angels flying around classical cities perched on cliffs flowing with waterfalls, to a bleak hell filled with giant shipwrecks and littered with crawling bodies. Justified since in that movie's mythos, Heaven is whatever you imagine it to be, and to Robin Williams' character that means living in his wife's beautiful landscape paintings.
  • Superman Returns and Hulk both fell short of the expectations of the two's franchise. However, both movies had an amazing sequence of showing off the two titanically powerful characters in very eye catching scenes (Hulk hopping around in the American Southwest desert and the Lois/Superman flight sequence). Not to mention the opening titles.
  • Russian Ark, a single take film encompassing thirty three rooms of the impossibly gorgeous Hermitage Museum, is arguably 100% Scenery Porn. It also reaches similar heights of art Porn, history Porn, and costume Porn.
  • The Coen Brothers do this in almost all of their movies in order to establish the era and area their movie is taking place in, but it's especially notable in Fargo and No Country for Old Men.
  • Used copiously in The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford. They spent half the runtime just on the breathtaking establishing shots.
  • There Will Be Blood. The scenery was the next biggest character after Daniel Plainview, even after Day-Lewis ingested mass quantities of it.
  • One of the many attributes of an Alfred Hitchcock film. He liked to make sure you knew that this was a real place, putting emphasis on noteworthy landmarks or monuments.
  • Jarringly averted in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which was set in Hawaii. There was hardly any Scenery Porn. In fact, if not for the fact that it's repeatedly mentioned (and odd little things like Mila Kunis' kukui-nut leis) it could have been any hotel in any tropical area.
  • The Hellboy series, especially the second movie (The Golden Army). The Troll Market scene in particular is beautifully done, looking like a peek into a filled-out and populated magical world.
  • Basically every movie produced and directed by Guillermo del Toro. Another recent example (from 2006) is El laberinto del fauno (Pans Labyrinth).
  • Wuxia examples: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, House of Flying Daggers...
    • The latter two were made by the visionary (pun intended) director Zhang Yimou, for whom Scenery Porn is a Signature Style. He can get breathtaking vistas out of a movie about four concubines that takes place exclusively in a single house (Raise the Red Lantern).
  • Walerian Borowczyck, whose softcore erotic films tend towards this trope. A good example is the short film La Marée (The Tide), from Immoral Tales, which features two young cousins taking a cycle ride to a white-cliffed beach in northern France.
  • The Emmanuelle series of films also frequently mix softcore porn with Scenery Porn.
  • The Twilight movie adaptation takes this to a ridiculous level, for no real reason except, perhaps, to seem "romantic": sweeping shots of mountains, fields of flowers, huge waterfalls. Too bad Forks, Washington looks NOTHING like the movie (and books) claims it does.
  • The road trip sequence at the end of Elizabethtown qualifies and is pretty much designed specifically to be gorgeous by the love interest so it will keep the protagonist's mind off his depression.
  • Akira Kurosawa is a master of this trope. Try seeing Ran and not falling in love with the amazing beautiful landscapes of Mount Aso (where most of the movie was shot).
  • Several scenes in Serenity, particularly the intro to Beaumonde, were shot to emphasize the beauty (or, in the case of Miranda, the surrealism) of the environments.
  • Hard Candy was directed by David Slade, who had primarily done music videos in the past. It shows; even though almost all of the movie takes place in a few rooms, it looks absolutely stunning, with saturated colors and narrow focus-planes.
  • In Bruges, thanks to the filmmakers' ability to use the rarely-filmed city as the actual shooting location.
  • The Qatsi trilogy and Baraka are mostly Scenery Porn and Awesome Music, although there's a good bit of shots of people without much interesting scenery behind them as well.
  • Jeremiah Johnson
  • Jurassic Park and its Sequel have lots of long shots showing off Kauai's mountains, jungles, and plains. And then dinosaurs were added and history was made.
  • Renegade (a.k.a. Blueberry) features a great deal of breathtaking panoramas often shot from sweeping helicopters.
  • Every single shot of Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist.
  • The extended shots of Chicago in Ferris Buellers Day Off.
  • Pretty much any film by Wong Kar-wai, another Chinese director for whom Scenery Porn (and stuff verging on the real) is a Signature Style. Some of his best Scenery Porn:
  • Michael Bay, for all his Strictly Formula, has admitted as such that around an hour into every movie he makes, there's a dramatic slow-motion sequence. These, as well as some other parts of his movies, often have awesome scenery.
  • Dead Mans Shoes has a lot of this, with grand sweeping shots of the beautiful countryside of the Peak District in north-central England standing in harsh contrast with the dark events of the film, an effect which Word of God confirms is intentional.
  • Mary Poppins had a very inviting London. And not a single frame of it is the real thing.
  • Young Einstein has some impressive Australian scenery in this segment (not to mention great music to go with it).
  • While not generally considered the best of the series, A Nightmare On Elm Street Part 4 The Dream Master and Freddys Dead the Final Nightmare are visually by far the most stunning.
  • David Lynch's Dune.
  • The Fountain. Throughout the entire film, you find it hard to pay attention to the astronaut's story because you're gawking at the visuals. Then, at the end, the conquistador reaches the tree and you're treated to an even more arresting vista.
  • The documentary Winged Migrations consists almost entirely of birds, Scenery Porn, and the most gorgeous music they could find. Also in the bird-watching genre; the icy landscapes in March Of The Penguins are bewitching (if not quite inviting.)
  • The movies Jean De Florette and Sequel Manon des Sources take place in the backcountry of Provence, France, and showcases scene after scene of beautiful countryside. Even the village is wonderfully old-fashioned. Since their release, the movies have greatly helped bring tourists to the surrounding region.
  • Martial-art action movie The Forbidden Kingdom contains absolutely beautiful panoramic shots of China, a mixture of realistic, and fantasy-based.
  • Nancy Meyers' films often are full of Scenery Porn. The Holiday uses shots of a house in LA and a cottage to compensate for the woefully awful story.
  • Giant, which begins with wide sweeping shots of the green Maryland countryside which then contrasts with the beautiful desolation of Texas.
  • The Wizard of Oz: First five minutes in Munchkinland showing off the art direction.
  • Slasher Flick Just Before Dawn has lots of beautiful shots of the Oregon forests and mountainside.
  • Solaris
    • Stephen Soderbergh's 2002 version isn't a great film, but it is worth watching for the panning shots of the eponymous planet's surreal oceans, coupled with Cliff Martinez's beautiful soundtrack.
    • The original 1972 film was one of the most expensive films to come out of the Soviet Union, and as a result, it is about 30% artistic montage. There is a beautiful sequence filmed of a man driving down a highway (filmed in Tokyo) that goes on for a solid five minutes, with no dialogue.
  • Rob Marshall's Memoirs of a Geisha is a beautiful example and one for Costume Porn. Although the filming took place in California, it was still a breathtaking choice to portray still-traditional Kyoto, Japan. All the cinematography was breathtaking and almost made up for the fact that it was kind of a mediocre film anyway.
  • Unlike many other conservationist documentaries, the French movie Oceans skips the statistics and goes straight to outrageously beautiful views of marine life, shot from impossible angles, with very little narrative.
  • Eve's Bayou includes many a sweeping panoramic shot of the eponymous swamp.
  • Letters to Juliet has been described as an advert for the Tuscan tourist board.
  • The Bird People in China showcases some of China's beautiful mountain scenery.
  • Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist does this to the Big Applesauce.
  • Prince of Persia the Sands of Time has this all the time. It's absolutely gorgeous.
  • The Duellists has some of the most beautiful naturally-captured vistas and scenery shots ever caught on film.
  • Suspiria is absolutely beautiful. Reds, blues, greens, you name it. It's a candy fest for the eyes.
  • Establishing shots in Northfork.
  • Baraka is a non-narrative film which contains nothing but Scenery Porn.
  • Starting with Prisoner of Azkaban the Harry Potter movies have shot many of Hogwarts' exteriors at gorgeous Scottish locations. In Deathly Hallows Part One where Harry, Ron, and Hermione are on the run, they camp out at beautiful spots all over Great Britain.
    • In Order of the Phoenix, there are many shots of the Ministry of Magic atrium, which gets wrecked at the end of the film.
  • The Dark Crystal and its Spiritual Successor Labyrinth both have intensely detailed fantasy worlds; since both also qualify as Starring Special Effects (specifically puppets) and were made before CGI was commonplace, the sets are that much more of a logistical and aesthetic triumph.
  • The Indonesian film Denias, Senandung di Atas Awan is filled with beautiful shot of the landscapes of Irian Jaya (Papua) including the snow covered Jayawijaya mountains. In one scene, we are treated to all of it from sweeping helicopters, truly breathtaking.
  • The eco movie Home is essentially 90 minutes of high octane Scenery Porn to make sure you sit through the entire lecture.
  • The 1980s' Conan the Barbarian tried to ape Frazetta as much as possible. Nearly every scene is based on one of his paintings.
  • Don Juan Demarco: Every sexual escapade the title character (Johnny Depp) describes takes place in a beautiful locale; a picturesque Mexican village, a richly adorned palace, an idyllic tropical island. (And of course Johnny himself is easy on the eyes.)
  • Never Cry Wolf: Loads of gorgeous Alaskan landscapes. For that matter, you'll be hard-pressed to find anything filmed in Alaska/ the Yukon that doesn't qualify for this trope.
  • Thor: Asgard may be completely computer-generated, but it is absolutely stunning. Jotunheim is also Scenery Gorn.
  • Unforgiven
  • Silk (2007): filmed in Japan and Italy and containing many sweeping establishing shots of places all around the world as the main character travels from Europe to Asia to fetch silkworms.
  • Almost any Bollywood romance film. Seriously, you can turn the sound off and just watch.
  • Valhalla Rising has notable amounts of Scenery Porn--long shots of the Scottish highlands and Eastern Canada with little dialogue.
  • Vertical Limit is set on K2 and was filmed on several mountains around the world, and makes full use of it. The beauty of the scenery almost makes the human suffering even more jarring.
  • As the title suggests, the romantic comedy A Walk in the Clouds is arguably nothing but this. Even the scene of the vineyards burning is gorgeous.
  • Also used extensively in The Beach, especially the scenes at the eponymous beach (which is the real beach at the Thai island Koh Phi Phi.)
  • The Last of the Mohicans, with North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains standing in for upstate New York, and looking so gorgeous that they upstage Madeleine Stowe and Daniel Day Lewis with hair extensions, which is not easy. Assisted by much Crowning Music of Awesome and many loincloths.
  • The Land Of Light, Nebula M78 in Mega Monster Battle Ultra Galaxy Legends.
  • American Graffiti. The combination of the cameras used to film it, the classic cars, neon street signs, and time period architecture all make for a very nice nostalgic visual treat.
  • Amelie is very well known for its distinct visual style.
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