Walter Mitty (Ben Stiller) arrives in Greenland, hoping to find photographer Sean O'Connell and the missing negative for Life Magazine's final cover.
It's comedic, and the more you look at it, the more ironic it becomes. You expect a large airliner to be at a major international airport, not one smaller than the plane. Flipping that around, at the small airport you'd expect a small plane, not one so large that the wing extends over the building. And despite all of those seats on board, there's no group of passengers making their way from the plane to the thermal. It seems as though the only people on board were the two folks that had just walked out of the terminal, one a local, the other our guy on his way to the rental stand.
Most large airports have hundreds of rentals available of different types. Convertible sports car, luxury sedan, large SUV, whatever you need it's available. But here, despite the large Airbus on the other side of the fence, there's only two cars, identifiable only by their colors. And even after our guy rents his, this small rental place will still have one available. All of this to say, why is there a need for the dedicated out-of-terminal rental stand, barely big enough for the attendant inside. Surely in the real world, it would be a small desk in the main terminal, some side job or additional duty for one of the airport employees. It's absurd to spend the money for a booth, for power, for networking, for a dedicated employee, for something so infrequently used. But, that's the irony.
Taken all together, it's an incredibly funny image. It subverts all expectations and, in the context of the film, it becomes the first "what did this guy just get himself into" moment.
This is a fairly simple shot that sticks to the basic "Rule of Thirds." The horizon is perfectly placed on the lower horizontal line while the left vertical line evenly splits between our main character and the terminal doors, more or less grouping them together to show that he just walked out of the building. (Note how the other person, further away and not grouped with those doors, is less narratively defined, possibly just walking by.) This also creates a little bit of motion. Since the doors are to the left of him, he's obviously walking across the frame to the right, and this implied line helps move our eyes across the image. The airliner does it better though. Acting as a giant arrow, the jet practically points at the rental car stand almost as if to say "here's the joke!"
Vehicles, much like people, need breathing space in images, a padding between their fronts or faces and the image's edge. For people, the eyes create implied lines that pull a viewer across the frame because we want to see what they're looking at. With vehicles, it's about wanting to see where they're going. Without this padding, they can look imbalanced, squished, or any other sort of "off". For the airliner, directly in the middle of the space between its nose and the frame is the rental car stand. When the "air greenland" text is used as a focus point, the image's right rule-of-third line splits the text into thirds, with 8 letters on one side of the line and 4 on the other. It also does it with the passenger windows too, 12 windows on one side of the line and 6 on the other. Not only does this give space infant of the aircraft, it also lets the plane be perceived in the horizontal center of the frame.
There's another unique division in this image, see if it's split into quarters. Vertically, the top of the plane barely crosses the half-image line, essentially placing everything below that line, and leaving the half the image ais nothing but empty sky. When all of the previous shots of the film have been inside buildings, or outside surrounded by New York City skyscrapers and Central Park trees, leaving so much sky highlights how different this shot is from what we've seen before. Horizontally, the airport is split in half, exactly along the image's midpoint, with the terminal on the left and the rental car lot on the right, and an almost equal amount of space between the image frame and the edges of the buildings.
Unfortunately, the one flaw in this composition is in the lens chosen to create it. To fit everything in the frame, an ultra-wide angle lens was used, a side effect of which is the lens distortion that creates a curved or bowed effect that becomes progressively more noticeable the further away from the center of the frame. Since there's very little at the top or bottom of the frame, it's almost unnoticed, but it's there. A more standard lens would've prevented that, but would've moved the camera further away from the terminal and that's not always an option. Maybe getting the camera in the right place would mean standing in the middle of a road or on the water. Maybe a building or other object is physically in the way.
The lighting is very flat. No shadows, just very smooth even lighting across the whole image. It's not exciting. It doesn't energize the image. But this is outdoor lighting and outdoor lighting always does one thing very very well: it expands the image beyond the frame, allowing a viewer to imagine the world beyond its borders. In this case, the dull and boring lighting lighting suggests that the town of Nuuk is just as dull and boring.
Bright colors grab attention. They're exciting and engaging. Dull colors are, well...dull. Not only does this shot show that, it reinforces our main character's doubts about this trip.
The image can be split into two parts. First is everything that's part of Nuuk. There's the brown dirt, dark grey road, light grey buildings, and far off grasses, mountains and clouds each in their natural colors. Each of these immobile objects are dull and desaturated, with a general blue/grey tint. In all, it's depressing. If the plane and car weren't able to provide their pop of color, the image would become almost forgettable.
Alternatively is everything man's built to leave Nuuk: the airplane and the two rental cars, all in bright primary colors that are exciting and almost call out to say "let's leave this terrible place!" and the more desaturated the environment gets, the stronger this message becomes.
Together, these two parts work in a way that neither would alone. The messaging would get lost if the scenery were as bright and vibrant as the plane and cars, or if they were as dull and boring as the scenery. But with that contrast making them as different as they are? Wonderful!
There's a quote that's sometimes accredited to Marco Polo: "Adventure is misery relieved at leisure." When you're going through it, and everything is so different from what you've known, it's uncomfortable. But afterwards, in the safety of friends and home, it's fun and enjoyable, and all of the hardships can be simply shrugged off. The is the start of his adventure, and everything about this image is different from what we've seen before. It's empty and it's depressing but it's also fun and humorous. If ever there was a photo that captured the "quintessence" of an adventure, this might just be it.