Forest Gump Movie Review

In this movie, Forest Gump directed by Robert Zemeckis, it displays the life of a man named Forest Gump. As a child, Forest met a young girl named Jenny in school who he falls in love with his whole life. Forest eventually leaves to go to war after college and is left every night thinking about Jenny. He even wrote her letters about the war every day, but soon got every letter he wrote to her returned to him. This meant that she never opened any of his letters or read them. In the novel The Things They Carried, the character Jim Cross was also thinking about a girl he fell in love with named Martha. Cross’s wanted “Martha to love him as much as he loved her, but the letters were mostly chatty, elusive on the matter of love.” (O'Brien 1) Much like Forest Gump, both characters wrote to the women they loved but never received any type of affection in return. Cross ended up burning the letters Martha wrote to prevent distraction and Forest used Jenny’s words of “Run Forest” to run from the airstrike. In a connection to “The Things They Carry” it can display how much solders “carry” from their lives at home with them throughout a war. 

After the war Forest is honored with a metal for saving solders from the airstrike. One of those people was Lieutenant Dan. He lost his legs in during the war and carried a grudge against 

Forest for saving his life because he wanted to come back as a hero or die like one. This connects to the chapter “On the Rainy River” when O’Brien was reasoning with his decision on going to war or not. O’Brien thought that he would “go to war- (he) would kill and maybe die- because (he) was embarrassed not to.” (O’Brien 11) Lieutenant Dan and O’Brien both felt the same thing about the war. They both didn’t want to be embarrassed by the results of the war that would affect them personally. 

In the duration of the time Forest spent in the war, Jenny was traveling the roads and was involved in an anti-war movement. They saw no point in the war and it was not worth it. This is just like how O’Brien felt in the beginning of the chapter “On the Rainy River”. He “was drafted to fight a war (he) hated. (He) was twenty-one years old. Young, yes and politically naïve, but even so the American war in Vietnam seemed to me wrong. Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons. I saw no unity of purpose” (O’Brien 2) This highlights how O’Brien’s thoughts was like the hippies and Jenny in Forest Gump. They all didn’t see any purpose to the war other than blood being shed for no reason.