Why Forrest Gump is Overrated

 

WARNING: THIS DOCUMENT CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THIS FILM

Forrest Gump is a film that is loved by many people and is known as a modern classic that is constantly referenced and made fun of. There are many people who love the film, some who say it’s one of their all-time favorites. Some of the people think it’s a great movie, and there are others that just like it. I know that there are people who don’t like it, too, but I am focusing on the fact that it has an 8.8 on IMDb and is #15 on IMDb’s Top 250. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture over The Shawshank Redemption and Pulp Fiction, which I think are both better than this. It also won five other Academy Awards including: Best Actor in a Leading Role, Best Director, Best Writing (Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published), Best Film Editing, and Best Effects (Visual Effects). I believe it only deserved one of those (Best Film Editing). Anyway, now it’s time to talk about what I think about the film and why this is titled “Why Forrest Gump is Overrated”. I really like the film, but I do not love it. In this I will be covering why I do not love it.

This is a 143 minute (2 hours, 23 minutes) film, so there has to be many plot turns to keep the audience’s attention throughout the entire running time. It does exactly that, but it does it too much. This brings me to my first flaw, the twists and turns.

The script makes Forrest Gump a big figure in history, but it goes too far. By the time Forrest ran all over the country, I got tired of the film. Though, I really think it went too far when he started to gets the business that makes him so wealthy. The film asked us to believe something that would never happen. This took me out of the film and when Forrest ran across the country, I was completely taken out of the film. That is one of the reasons the twists and turns did not work for me. I have another, though.
            When the film turns, it gets a whole new tone and type of dialogue with it, and it does this several times. Not only is the film tonally inconsistent, it starts to seem like these are different stories. In the beginning, Forrest is a little kid, then a teenager, then a young adult, then he’s in the military, then he’s meeting the President, then he’s a professional ping-pong player, etc. Every separate story seems to forget what the film had before.

Because this film jumps randomly to many storylines, it will always have a different tone, and sometimes, pacing. This brings me to next flaw, which is the pacing.

It would be hard to keep this film paced evenly, but this is still a flaw. If it would have been too hard for the filmmakers to do, then they didn’t have to try it. Anyway, what is wrong with the pacing is that it is all over the place. Sometimes the film is incredibly slow and sometimes it is incredibly fast. The film needed to make up its mind of how it needed to be paced instead of constantly switching between being fast-moving and slow-moving.

Because the studios think that we, the viewers, are extremely dumb, they feel the need to add more things than just the 15,000 different stories to keep us entertained. They also need to make the movie the type of movie where the main storyline is our main character talking to someone else, telling them everything that happened, while we see it. This is my third flaw.

For most of the film, this style works, although it is just for our entertainment. But it is hard to believe that these people are listening for about an hour while Forrest goes over random stuff. My real flaw is that about with about 20 to 30 minutes left in the film, we catch up to him. After that, we are no longer in the style of him talking to somebody about what happened in the past, while we see it. This plot turn does not work at all, because the past two hours we had narration to us and we knew we were not caught up. This was yet another thing that took me out of the film in the second half.

The film tries to have real drama and comedy, but they do not mix well. The comedy works, but in what are supposed to be more meaningful parts in the film, it just comes off silly. This brings me to my fourth, and final, flaw: the drama did not work.

This script is not that good. Most of the dialogue does not seem that good and just comes off cheesy. That’s probably why the drama doesn’t work. This is an incredibly cheesy film that does not know how to have good drama. It takes itself too seriously. It is good at being goofy entertainment, but it is not able to be something more, as it is trying to do.

Those are my four biggest flaws with Forrest Gump that I feel weighs the film down and keeps me from loving it. I have other flaws with the film, such as how war was depicted in a comedic way, but those were not very big, so I decided not to include them. The whole film suffers from a few flaws with the script, but what brings the film down the most is the second half. That is when the film goes too far and loses a lot of steam. Though, this is still a really good movie that is very original and mostly very entertaining. I do not hate the film, or even dislike it, at all. I very much like the film. I just do not think it is worthy of Best Picture and its 8.8 on IMDb and its spot at #15 in IMDb’s Top 250. Though, there are ratings I do agree with, and those are the ratings given by critics. I give this film an 8.1/10. Its Metascore is 82/100 and it has 72% Tomato Meter on Rotten Tomatoes. Those are numbers I agree with more.