Scenery Porn / Live-Action Films

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"And those sweeping shots of New Zealand. Fuck yeah! I'm gonna vacation there!"

— The Nostalgia Critic (discussing The Lord of the Rings), The Nostalgia Critic

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• Probably the earliest example of this is the staggering Babylon set◊ that D.W. Griffith built for his silent epic Intolerance.
• The first two Aliens films in particular are super lavish in their attention to set detail that makes the sets look like real locations in many instances.
• In An Angel at My Table, lush landscapes of southern New Zealand and scenery in Ibiza are shown.
• Arachnophobia: The first fifteen minutes have some beautiful shots of both South America (blowing mist, a waterfall, mountain sinkholes etc.) and the California countryside.
• Av The Hunt: Rural Turkey may be a hellhole of Honour Related Abuse, but it also has some stunning landscapes!
• 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.
  • One of the few movies that some people like solely because of this.
  • The Blu-ray release even had the tagline "The movie Blu Ray was made for!"
  • The sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water ups the ante with more advanced special effects, allowing the Pandoran jungles, reefs, and islands to be shown in breathtaking detail. Special mention goes to the Metkayina village, it’s surrounding reefs, and the Cove of the Ancestors.
• Titanic (1997) gives us shots of the exquisitely designed first class areas of the ship. (And jaw-dropping scenes of the same gorgeous rooms being obliterated)
• 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.
• 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.
• Aquaman is loaded with amazing scenery, whether may it be scenes in Atlantis, sweeping shots throughout Sicily, the underground caverns beyond the trench where Aquaman finds his mother Atlanna, sandy beaches or just underwater scenes in general. Pause at any random moment of the film and you'll easily find a screenshot worthy of a desktop wallpaper background.
• Big Game has several long, beautiful establishing shots of Finnish (actually Bavarian) mountains.
• 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.
• Cry_Wolf: There are some stunning shots of autumn leaves around the campus.
• 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 everytime, and also by changing the story's setting from Iowa City to the more picturesque Dubuque County.
• Amazing Grace and Chuck: The majestic vistas of Montana get more than a few lingering shots and make for a beautiful backdrop to many scenes. Notably, though the story takes place over the course of a year, it always seems to be a beautifully sunny, summer day.
• 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.
• The Edge: There are some fantastic shots of mountain ranges, lakes, forests, and glaciers.
• Hunt for the Wilderpeople: The mountain scenery is captured beautifully, something Hec lampshades.
  Hec: Pretty majestical, ain’t it?
• 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:
  • Badlands
  • Days of Heaven
  • The Thin Red Line
  • The Tree of Life
• 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.
• The Lord of the Rings. The films are sometimes described as "the best advert the New Zealand Tourist Board ever had", and even Amazon's show was filmed there because of them.
  • 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 and publicity photos, it seems that the prequel to LOTR, The Hobbit, will follow in its footsteps in showing the beautiful landscape of New Zealand.
    • The higher film speed it’s being shot in (48 fps instead of 24) is supposed to enhance this even more and give it an incredibly beautiful and fantastic look.
  • Many of the sets show an equally incredible attention to detail. Same with props and costumes. Several of the actors commented on how their outfits were less costume and more "real" clothes. The set/prop/costume makers achieved this by manufacturing their projects as real items, rather than simply to look good on screen.
    • This gave Jackson more freedom to change shots during shooting. Théoden's sword-tapping run before the Rohirrim's charge at Minas Tirith was an improvisation made on the day that wouldn't have worked if the swords had been made of balsa wood.
• One of the few positively received aspects of Eragon was that it broke with tradition and chose dark horse Hungary over New Zealand, and includes several indulgent aerial shots of the landscape.
• 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.
• The Great Silence: The movie can’t go long without lingering on gorgeous shots of the snow-covered mountains and looming canyon walls.
• 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.
• Star Trek: Insurrection takes place on a beautiful Earth-like planet in a gorgeous nebula.
• Star Trek Into Darkness:
  • There's an absolutely huge amount of background detail in every shot of Earth, fleshing out the culture, the civilian lifestyle, and generally showing how the world has evolved.
  • A few of the bar scenes make hilariously great references to 1960s culture, however, giving a nod to the era in which Star Trek was born (and from which much of TOS's set design was drawn).
  • We get to see a lot more of the internal workings of the Enterprise, including Sickbay and Engineering.
• Star Trek Beyond has the beyond awesome interior of Starbase Yorktown. This is what the future should look like.
• 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.
• Ridley Scott loves rich visuals.
  • 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.
  • Legend (1985) has scenery that, combined with Jerry Goldsmith's Ravel-inspired score, might make you feel woozy with sugar overdose...
  • Scott specifically did a romantic comedy, A Good Year, to shoot near his home in the French Riviera. The movie is divisive, but the scenery is so beautiful you can't blame Scott.
• 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 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.
• George Lucas certainly knows 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 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 Fanservice or Stuff Blowing Up fall into this category a lot of the time. Examples:
  • The footage of İstanbul in From Russia with Love.
  • The drive through France and Switzerland in Goldfinger. Interestingly enough, the book had a version of this as well.
  • The spectacular aerial footage of Japan in You Only Live Twice.
  • The Swiss Alps in On Her Majesty's Secret Service.
  • The Italian Alps and the islands of Greece in For Your Eyes Only.
  • India in Octopussy.
  • The train ride into Montenegro in Casino Royale (2006). Which is not in fact Montenegro, it's the Czech Republic.
  • The view of the San Francisco Bay in A View to a Kill. The film's end credits were a Money Shot of the Golden Gate Bridge (where the final battle took place).
  • Skyfall is brimming with beautiful scenery, amplified by the unique cinematography of Roger Deakins.
  • Spectre has Mexico City, Rome and Tangiers.
  • No Time to Die has Matera in Southern Italy, the nature of Norway and the Kuril Islands (actually Faroe Islands).
• Around the World in 80 Days (1956) — 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 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.
  • Shane, with its spectacular Technicolor shots of Wyoming's Jackson Hole region.
  • 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 Journey of Natty Gann: While trying to reach her father, Natty travels through some gorgeous mountains and prairies that go on and on, although this is occasionally deconstructed with a Nature Is Not Nice moment, such as when she nearly freezes during a sudden rainstorm.
• The films of David Lean (especially Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago) are textbook examples of this trope.
• 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 and it's Gothic stylings a particularly good example.
• Joel Schumacher's Batman movies qualify as well, but are far more bright, garish, heavily-produced, and just plain campy, albeit with far more expansion on the overall cityscape and more of a reliance on abstract structural anatomy, as opposed to Burton's 'less is more' approach of vintage film noir-style cityscapes mixed with gothic architecture. For all intents an purposes, Schumacher's Batverse is Batman-meets-Baz Luhrmann or Rob Marshall, and is designed more like a Broadway stage play than a major motion picture.
• Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Trilogy may have a more realistic look to them, but Nolan manages to make Gotham look beautiful in its own way, including the IMAX shots of Gotham and Hong Kong (as well as Bruce's yacht), which are gorgeous.
  • Inception should be called, Scenery Porn: The Motion Picture.
• Alice in Wonderland (2010) is jam-packed with this.
• Van Helsing had so much eye candy it outshone many of the movie's flaws.
  • And so did "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time", shot in the dazzling mountains and deserts of Southern Morocco.
• 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 their franchises. 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). Then there are 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 Daniel 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.
• 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.
• Every movie produced and directed by Guillermo del Toro. Another example is El laberinto del fauno (Pan's Labyrinth).
• Wuxia examples: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero (2002), 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 designed specifically to be gorgeous by the love interest so it will keep the protagonist's mind off his depression.
• Akira Kurosawa was 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.
  • Same goes for Samsara, Ron Fricke's follow-up to Baraka, as well as his earlier short film Chronos, his first film as director after having been cinematographer for Koyaanisqatsi.
• Jurassic Park (1993) and The Lost World: Jurassic Park 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 Bueller's Day Off.
  • A joke in the MAD magazine parody of Bueller had it that one of the places "Fearless Buller" and his entourage went that day was the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, to pick up a check for making the movie into one long travelogue of Chicago.
• 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:
  • Days of Being Wild — Rebel Without a Cause for the Hong Kong set.
  • Chungking Express
  • Ashes of Time — Wuxia flick with arthaus sensibilities.
  • 2046 — so long-delayed that the Gallows Humor of the production crew was the film would be completed in 2046.
• 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 Man's 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 (and great music to go with it).
• While not generally considered the best of the series, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare are visually by far the most stunning.
• David Lynch's Dune (1984).
  • Denis Villeneuve's Dune (2021) and Dune: Part Two too.
• The Fountain. Throughout the 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 Movie 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 (1977) is absolutely beautiful. Reds, blues, greens, you name it. It's a candy fest for the eyes.
• Establishing shots in Northfork.
• A Lonely Place to Die shows just how beautiful, yet dangerous, the Scottish Highlands are.
• Baraka is a non-narrative film which contains nothing but Scenery Porn. It could be compared with the earier Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi, but it was shot on Todd-AO 70mm, giving vastly better picture quality than 35mm. It was the first film ever to be scanned at 8k resolution for Blu-ray (8,192 horizontal pixels)^note  4k is equivalent to 35mm quality, and some Blu-ray movies are scanned at 2k, which is only slightly better quality than HD, and boy, does it show!
• 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 lecture.
• The 1980s' Conan the Barbarian (1982) tried to ape Frazetta as much as possible. Nearly every scene is based on one of his paintings.
• Don Juan De Marco: 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 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.
• The Spirit: There are some gorgeous shots of the snowy urban landscapes in the first couple of minutes of the film, as the Spirit waxes on about being a Man of the City.
• Thor: Asgard may be completely computer-generated, but it is absolutely stunning. Jotunheim is also Scenery Gorn.
• Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) uses many of the same stylistic choices as Thor, allowing for some truly gorgeous space-scapes. A couple shots seem like they're trying to duplicate Jack Kirby himself's drawing style.
• 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 Awesome Music and many loincloths.
• Ultra Series:
  • The Land of Light, Nebula M78 in Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy Legends.
  • The sequel, Ultraman Zero: The Revenge of Belial is also filled with scenery porn.
• 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.
• Amélie is very well known for its distinct visual style.
• The Bollywood film Ek Tha Tiger, with gorgeous shots of Ireland, Turkey, and Cuba, and brief clips of about half-a-dozen other beautiful cities as well.
• Wes Anderson's films are almost always recognizable by the rich, vivid sets. Each movie can be condensed into one colour scheme. A shining example is The Darjeeling Limited, in which three brothers travel on a train across India. Almost any frame from the movie is beautiful enough to potentially be used as a desktop background.
• Any Nicholas Sparks movie is bound to featuring numerous lovely shots of North Carolina.
• But the few bits of untouched scenery we do see in Oblivion (2013) such as Jack's hideaway are beautiful.
• When Red Cliff is not lovingly showing every grain of dust during the fluorishing clashes of thousand-man armies, it's giving sweeping shots of Southern China.
• After Earth: When not being attacked by the extremely dangerous fauna, the landscapes of Earth are absolutely breathtaking.
  • Nova Prime is richly designed, particularly after building the human settlements.
• The Master was the first narrative film in sixteen years to be shot in 65mm (and the first in fifteen years to run in 70mm), which allows the film's settings to be shown off with amazing clarity (even on a smaller screen) and scope. This trope is most notable in the film's motorcycle sequence.
• Vincente Minnelli films often contain examples of scenery porn, especially the ones filmed in Technicolor. The ballet sequence in An American in Paris and Gigi with actual shots of Paris.
• War Horse is set mostly in the English countryside and Steven Spielberg definitely makes sure to show the location off in the film (Spielberg even called it the most beautiful place he'd ever shot a film).
• The Chocolate Room in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory without a doubt.
  • Exaggerated in the second film adaptation.
• Andrei Tarkovsky was undeniably a master of this trope:
  • The 1983 movie Nostalghia plays this trope straight, albeit with a twist: The masterful cinematography makes the lavish Tuscan scenery look haunting and otherwordly, albeit sometimes in a pretty frightening manner and the bleakest looking indoors set can best be compared to a moving oil painting.
  • Stalker (1979) effortlessly blends this trope with elaborated Scenery Gorn.
• Elysium itself. It looks absolutely gorgeous.
• While a lot of negative things could be said about The Chronicles of Riddick, the design for the Necromonger sets, blending Art Deco and Baroque inspired styles in an undeniably original manner, is indeed quite the looker.
• Enforced in Summer Lovers. It was filmed in Greece, and MANY of the settings were used BECAUSE of their attractiveness.
• Another Time, Another Place was shot on the Black Isle in Aberdeenshire and it definitely makes the most of its setting.
• Monsoon Wedding is colourful and filled with beautiful shots of wedding decorations and flowers, and the scenery of India. The outside of the house is verdant with strings of marigolds.
• Trainspotting: Perhaps it is shite being Scottish, but damn if the highlands aren't gucking forgeous.
• In The Wolfman (2010), there's countless gorgeous shots of the English country side coupled with the elaborate sets and props.
• The shots of the loch and mountains in What We Did on Our Holiday really show off the Scottish Highlands
• In Ex Machina, Nathan's estate is built in a beautiful valley, and the audience is regularly gratified by a shot of the landscape.
• In Jupiter Ascending, all the scenery is taken to an absurd degrees of detail, ranging from the insides of even the cruisers and motorbikes, to the individual planets and the starships.
• Interstellar blends real-world location photography, highly detailed miniature and full-scale models, and spectacular CG space backgrounds to create a hauntingly beautiful atmosphere throughout. Any scene with the film's famous black hole in it is particularly beautiful.
• The 2015 adaptation of Macbeth takes advantage of filming in Scotland, with many shots spent just highlighting the gorgeous landscape.
• Captain From Castile has some simply gorgeous Technicolor shots of Mexico's natural scenery.
• Dollars Trilogy gives us the rugged beauty of Almeria, Spain.
• The Jungle Book (2016)'s visual effects were done by many of the same people who worked on Avatar (including its VFX director Rob Legato), and it shows. Apart from the performance of Neel Sethi (Mowgli), nearly everything in the film is computer-generated: the jungle, the animals, the water, the fire, the list goes on. But you'd never know it from looking at the film: it's all incredibly realistic. The animators have Shown Their Work in creating the animals, and manage to animate their speech without descending into the Unintentional Uncanny Valley (with the arguable exception of Scarlett Johansson's snake character Kaa, a One-Scene Wonder). And the jungle is every bit as beautiful as you'd want it to be. This film is one of the finest examples of this trope to be released in years, if not ever.
• K2: Siren of the Himalayas: K2 is situated among some of the most spectacular vistas in the world, and the cameras just love it.
• Warcraft (2016) has created a beautiful rendition of the human city of Stormwind, and the movie delights in showing us wide shots of it.
• Help!: The film does look good, with lush scenery from the Alps, the Bahamas, and Stonehenge.
• Napoléon: Napoléon Bonaparte's ride through the Corsican countryside, and most of the Triptych sequence.
• Logan and Lucy's journey from Portland to Jacksonville in Canyon Passage seems designed to showcase as much of Oregon's marvelous wilderness as possible.
• In addition to Mad Max: Fury Road's stunning action setpieces, it is filled from start to finish with absolutely breathtaking scenery and vistas, despite the fact that it's almost all a post-apocalyptic desert.
• Happy Together: A rather unique case in that Buenos Aires isn't depicted glamorously - the characters spend most of the film broke or near-broke so the events of the film largely take place in the working class barrios. That said, everything is shot beautifully and romantically. Played much more straightforwardly with the shots of the Iguazu Falls.
• Des hommes et des dieux makes sure to show the beautiful landscape around the monastery.
• Beyond the Pyramids: Legend of the White Lion spends a lot of its middle and middle-to-final on showcasing the African (i.e., Kenyan and Tanzanian, but not identified as such and, you know, part of another world) landscape and wildlife.
• The Mountie contains many spectacular panoramas of the beautiful Yukon wilderness.
• Early parts of Jungle feature many spectacular shots of The Amazon Rainforest. However, once Yossi is stranded in the jungle, it shifts from being a thing of wonder and becomes a Hungry Jungle.
• Everest is full of magnificent mountain shots. That being a Death World where the altitudes are marked with frozen corpses, this crosses into Scenery Gorn.
• Wonder Woman (2017): The cinematography and production design for Themyscira and its architecture is absolutely stunning.
• Blooded contains many panoramic shots of the beautiful, rugged and desolate landscape on the Isle of Mull.
• The Sense of Wonder contains many shots of Louise's pear orchard and the beautiful French countryside surrounding it.
• The Cult Classic British fantasy film Highlander has a lot of beautiful aerial shots of the Scottish highlands.
• Pokémon Detective Pikachu features numerous views of Ryme City, filled with both human and CGI Pokémon side by side.
• Last of the Dogmen: The majority of the movie takes place amidst stunning mountain scenery that looks like it has never seen the effects of the Industrial Age.
• Scream (1996) director Wes Craven wanted an Everytown, America look for the town of Woodsboro, and for filming, he settled on the California Wine Country around the city of Santa Rosa and went out of his way to remind viewers of that, with frequent shots of the landscape around the town. It's most pronounced in the scene where Sidney returns home from school the day after Casey and Steve are killed, where we see that her house has a hell of a view of some verdant fields and rolling hills. It's less pronounced in the sequels, with the second film set on an Ohio college campus (played by Atlanta and Los Angeles), the third set on a Hollywood backlot, and later films set back in Woodsboro but with the town played by Ann Arbor, Michigan in the fourth and Wilmington, North Carolina in the fifth.
• Lake Placid: The lakeside, forest, and nearby meadows are captured pretty gorgeously at the beginning of 3.
• Vertigo's visual treatment of 1950s San Francisco should qualify as "urban scenery porn" if there is such a category. And there are lots of shots of beautiful Northern California countryside, as Scottie and Madeleine visit Muir Woods and Mission San Juan Bautista.
• Dark August contains many shots of the beautiful forests and mountains surrounding Stowe, Vermont, where the movie was filmed.
• White Wolves: All four films have breathtaking scenery of isolated mountains and rivers.
• Dragonheart is a great showcase of beautiful Slovakian scenery, including a castle.
• Compulsion (2016): The film showcases the beauty of the countryside in Italy where it's set. Beautiful art as well (paintings or statues) also served as this often, as these abound too, often with close-up shots that the camera lingers on.
• Small Town Santa: The intro of the movie is set inside a multi-story workshop filled to the brim with all kinds of toys, and has G-Scale model trains moving about it. The intro has a wide shot looking upward at the workshop, and often cuts to focus on certain objects.
• The Danish Girl: The film shows many beautiful scenes from Copenhagen and Paris in the 1920s.
• Forrest Gump: Near the very end, as Jenny lies on her deathbed, she asks Forrest about Vietnam:
  Jenny: Hey, Forrest, were you scared in Vietnam?
  Forrest: Yes. Well, I, I don't know. [Flashback to Vietnam, Forrest looks up into the sky as the rain stops, and looks at the stars emerge from behind the storm clouds.] Sometimes it would stop raining long enough for the stars to come out. And then it was nice. [Flashback to the top deck of the shrimping boat It was like just before the sun goes to bed down on the bayou. There was over a million sparkles on the water. Like that mountain lake. [Flashback to when he was running for months, in front of a mountain reflected on the surface of a lake] It was so clear, Jenny. It looks like there were two skies, one on top of the other. And then in the desert, when the sun comes up. [Flashback to when he was running in the middle of the desert in the Southwest U.S. and the morning light casts an orange glow over the desert] I couldn't tell where heavens stopped and the earth began. It was so beautiful. [Forrest looks at Jenny]
  Jenny: I wish I could have been there with you.
• Emily: Fitting for a biopic about a Gothic writer, the film contains many sweeping shots of the English countryside, sunny hills and dreary moors all. At one point Emily and Branwell get high on opium and wander dazedly through the moors, basking in the surrounding nature.
• Daddy Issues: The finale shows many beautiful scenes of Florence, Italy (it was filmed on location) while Maya roams the city.
• Paperback Hero: The trees and plains of the Australian Outback get some loving tracking shots, with the occasional sunrise added to them. The blue sky right before sunrise outlining city buildings is also filmed in a lovely way.
• Arguably a big part of the appeal of Wild, especially as the movie barely has any plot, but it's about a long hike.
• The Lost Medallion: The Adventures of Billy Stone shows a lot of the jungles, mountains and waterfalls of Thailand, as the main characters get transported back in time 200 years ago to a land of villages and nature.
• Force of Nature: The Dry 2: The film, shot in the Dandenong Ranges and the Latrobe Valley, contains plenty of spectacular shots of the rugged but beautiful Victorian alpine wilderness. When the lost hikers stumble upon the lookout, all of them are struck by the beauty of where they are, despite the danger they are in.
• The Family Plan: While the family are on the road in Colorado, we see some great shots of the Rocky Mountains briefly.

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