Political Thriller - Conventions

The conventions of a political thriller :

• threat is set against a back drop of political power struggle
• plots are designed to give political power to someone
• opponent characters are set up to try and prevent people receiving power
• two sets of characters - ranked in authority.

An example of a political-thriller that we looked at was "the interpreter".

The typical conventions that we recognised throughout this trailer of a political-thriller, were immediately noticed through the dialogue used where the characters where talking about the political threat of someone planning to kill the president and the protagonist who was trying to prevent this from happening. Furthermore the enigma at the beginning was the threat which again follows the typical conventions that you find in this sub-genre.

In the trailer it becomes apparent that the antagonist is the person trying to gain political power by killing the president and then taking over the country, another typical convention.

Nicole Kidman, the protagonist was the character in the film who was trying to prevent the opponent characters of receiving the power of ruling the country by informing the government of the phone call she received.

It was clearly shown the ranked authority of the two characters in the film because the government did not believe Nicole Kidman's theory of the president going to be assassinated in the future purely because she was their employee and had no importance in their eyes.