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Homage Shot
Film directors start out as movie buffs, often of the most obscure sorts of films. On top of that, many modern directors went to film school and saw hundreds of legendary movies. Even after they get to direct movies of their own, they often love to use angles, compositions, and shots they saw in school. Of course, all directors use tricks and shots invented long before. But while anyone can do a Power Walk, it takes skill and devotion to light and shoot a power walk exactly like Philip Kaufmann did in The Right Stuff (especially if your film isn't about astronauts).

This trope does not count deliberate parody, or remakes of old movies, unless it's a new adaptation from the original medium. (Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy qualifies for this trope, while the remake of Psycho does not.) Something similar occasionally appears in comics, but the comparative ease of copying (light tables) makes it hard to tell the homages from the flat-out swipes.

Occasionally this is Inspiration Nod, but usually it's more of a Shout Out to a director that inspired them to get into the business. It's Pietà Plagiarism but of the church of cinema. If the homage is referential to a series or property's own past, it's an Internal Homage.

Examples

  • The entire Comic Books medium can be summed up by this comic book cover archive.
  • Steven Spielberg is the absolute king of this. While his own style is distinctive (and subject to homage by other directors), he loves to work in bits from other movies.
    • His longest sequence of homage shots comes in the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan. As the rangers hit the beach, Spielberg slips in bits from war movies that have come before (this case might count as Pink Bunny Slippers). After Tom Hanks falls into the water, we have a shot of bullets making water trails round floating bodies that looks like a scene from Peter Weir's Gallipoli. As the troops crawl along the beach, we see a medic checking a wounded soldier and discovering that he's been completely eviscerated. The wounds and the pose are straight out of Catch-22. Lastly, we catch a glimpse of a wounded man holding his own severed arm, a twin of a shot from Kurosawa's Ran.
    • Many people noted the use of the generic "Japanese man looking back at Godzilla" shot in Jurassic Park II. More obscure is the sequence where the hunters are running through the tall grass at night. A series of tracking pans of each figure, snapping back to pick up the next man, it's a direct lift from Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, down to the tall grass. The moonlight helps match it to the black-and-white original.
  • George Lucas is also an old Kurosawa fan. (He, Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola were instrumental in finding the money for Ran.) While Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope is built off Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress and The Dam Busters, the homage shot (the pan along the ground to a severed arm) is lifted from Yojimbo. There's also bits and pieces of other stuff, like Westerns and older Sci Fi movies, if you pay real close attention and know what to look for.
  • Peter Jackson shot one bit at Bilbo's birthday party in The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring ("Proudfeet!") as an exact copy of a shot in Ralph Bakshi's animated The Lord Of The Rings. Jackson even helpfully points this out in the commentary. A circle-round shot of the four hobbits at Weathertop is also lifted from the original, although the camera moves much faster and Aragorn is absent. And the hobbits hiding in the crotch of a tree from the Nazgul? Also from the Bakshi version. (It's the last shot you'd expect, isn't it?)
    • The scene at the black gates of Mordor appears to be a homage to The Wizard of Oz.
      • That's just the tip of the iceberg:
      • Saruman telekinetically closing the 4 doors in his tower to keep Gandalf trapped in Orthanc mirrors a similar scene in Dragonslayer where Ulrich traps Galen in the wizard's tower-yes, 4 doors are also involved.
      • Sam and Frodo on an island of rock in a sea of lava, awaiting rescue? See Kirk and (a regenerated) Spock in Star Trek III (saved by the transporter not the eagles).
      • This is straight out of the book version of Return of the King, not from Star Trek III, unless there's some special way it was shot in Star Trek III that was duplicated in the movie version of Return of the King that I'm not aware of.
      • Wormtongue brings a flame too close to some gunpowder, Saruman deftly moves the flame away = The Wise Man and Ash respectively in Army of Darkness.
      • Another The Wizard of Oz example: Saruman (through a possessed King Theoden) telling Gandalf that "You have no power here!", a line for line echo of what Glinda says to the Wicked Witch of the West.
      • And again: Frodo and Sam crouching behind a boulder as they watch enemy troops march past near an enemy citadel essentially duplicates the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion as they plot to enter the Wicked Witch's citadel. Can you tell that PJ loves this film yet?
  • Another animation to (sorta) live-action lift: Luna's Patronus in the film version of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is a rabbit. It runs around the air in a pattern lifted from the opening narration/montage of the movie Watership Down ("Prince with a thousand enemies").
  • Animation copying animation: Several of the shots during the final chase in the first Kim Possible episode at Camp Wanaweep look exactly like a Jonny Quest episode that also featured a villain like that in The Creature From The Black Lagoon. Gill swims down through the bubbles in the same pose and as the creature.
  • Dirty Pair OAV #6 has a scene with Yuri and her mob-scion/fiance-for-an-episode running along the beach in the setting sun, tripping and rolling/falling and finally kissing. It looks like a commercial, and it is, sort of. Yuri and Beau are directly re-creating a lipstick commercial from an old Urusei Yatsura episode. Only the commercial famously cut out right before the kiss.
  • The first shot of the fight between Diego and Soto at the end of Ice Age is identical to the first shot of Simba's fight with Scar at the end of The Lion King.
  • Lilo & Stitch has a shot of Stitch walking away in a path surrounded by foliage that is taken directly from the 1939 Silly Symphony short The Ugly Duckling. An earlier scene has him by the road under the rain while a frog sits by him, in reference to the bus stop scene in Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro.
  • The Metal Gear Solid games do this with actual hidden meanings, and so frequently it gets to the point where it's like What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic? but with movies instead of religion.
    • In Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, there's an homage shot to The Right Stuff, done entirely in narration. In Strangelove's audio tapes, she describes a scene where NASA is selecting someone for a suicide mission in space, and how no-one volunteered until The Boss raised her hand, "as if acting out a scene from a movie".
  • The Simpsons does this all the time, mostly for the sake of parody. The scene where Homer bites into a "Ribwich" for the first time, and his pupils dilate and we have sudden shots of the food travelling down his gullet, is a pitch-perfect recreation of a scene from Requiem for a Dream.
  • In a more obscure gaming homage, the briefing scenes from Microprose's Gunship 2000 helicopter simulator look almost identical to the briefing shots in Fire Birds.
  • Final Fantasy XII pays more than a few homages to Star Wars. Most noticeable are the Strahl/Millenium Falcon taking off from Rabanastre/Mos Eisley, and Gabranth/Vader disembarking his shuttle as the game/movie's Imperial March plays.
  • In a very weird example, the "windowpane scene" between Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert in A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift Of All is a direct clone of the Tear Jerker ending of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Without the Vulcan hand sign, obviously.
  • Another video game example: Silent Hill 2 contains a scene almost directly lifted from David Lynch's Blue Velvet.
  • Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha has done quite a few salutes to Humongous Mecha franchises such as Gundam and Super Robot Wars, with the most popular of these likely coming from Subaru's Transformation Sequence, where the Power Crystal of her device comes out in the same way and with the same dimensions as the G-Stone reveal during GaoGaiGar's Final Fusion.
  • The number of comic book covers which homage the X-Men: Days of Future Past cover (the one with the 'wanted' and 'deceased' posters on the wall) is truly staggering.
  • The anime preview FMV in Star Ocean: Second Evolution has a shot of Dias standing amidst fire lifted straight out of the famous FMV of Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII, down to the placement of the flames.
  • Jennifer's Body contains several homage shots to the Twilight movie, all twisted in some way, like Jennifer kissing her victim in a forest clearing that looks like the one where Edward confessed that he was a vampire to Bella; and the deer lapping the victim's corpse, which recalls the deer sipping from a pool that Edward ate at the start of Twilight.
  • Film sequences that are especially prone to homage:
  • The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time film had a scene where the camera rotates around The Prince on a high tower to give a good view of the landscape. The exact same shot which was used for viewpoints in Assassin's Creed, which was created by the same game studio as Prince of Persia.
  • Pirates of the Caribbean: Gore Verbinski stuck in a virtually identical shot of Orlando Bloom in Tortuga echoing one he did in the 1st Lord of the Rings film in Lothlorien: in both cases Bloom reacts to an offscreen comment or activity with a concerned look as he turns his head.
  • First page of Samurai Deeper Kyo seems to be going for this general effect vis-a-vis the first page of Rurouni Kenshin, not in doing the exact same thing visually but in doing close to the same thing, period, with a different era and a different made-up swordsman. See the SDK page for ridiculously intricate details.
    • Or it was attempting ripoffhood.
    • Well, yeah, but.
  • Word Of God has stated the scene in Love Actually where Mark reveals that he's in love with Juliet by showing her his tape of her wedding, which is entirely made up of shots of her is a homage to the ending of Cinema Paradiso.
  • Pandorum has loads of these.
  • The Mobile Suit Gundam SEED series has the following, since it's a reimagining of the original Mobile Suit Gundam:
    • Lacus's exit from her escape pod at the end of episode 7 and the beginning of episode 8 was a nod to Lalah Sune's exit from her shuttle in episode 34 of Mobile Suit Gundam.
    • In episode 23 of Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny, Heine (piloting the GOUF Ignited) fighting Stellar (in her Gaia Gundam) is a nod to the fight between Amuro and Ramba Ral in episode 12 of Mobile Suit Gundam, with the same pink background during the fight.
    Heine: This is no ZAKU, pal. NO ZAKU!!
  • In Aragami there is an Homage Shot to Metal Gear Solid, of which the director, Ryuhei Kitamura, is an outspoken fan. When the nameless Samurai shoots at Miyamoto Musashi, Musashi dodges, and then stands framed exactly like the cyborg Ninja in Metal Gear Solid does if you try shooting at him in battle. He performs an identical sequence of Weapon Twirling as him, and then directly quotes the Ninja by saying "You can't defeat me with a weapon like that."
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