Clint Eastwood's Invictus

The movie followed three separate but connected story lines: Nelson Mandela becoming the first black President in South Africa, Mandela’s new security squad becoming integrated, and the South African rugby team uniting a country by winning the world cup. Clint Eastwood did a great job with this movie, he really went in and tired to show the audience's how the racial divide affected everyone, no matter what class or profession. My only issue with this movie is that Eastwood stuck to telling all three of these story lines, and not getting deep enough into one to really make this a great movie. I did enjoy how most of the Rugby matches were filmed. It really put you inside of the game and you could get a sense of how hard hitting and aggressive the sport really is. It is a hooligan’s sport played by gentlemen.

Morgan Freeman was born to play Nelson Mandela, the two look like brothers and have become quite good friends in real life, both respecting each other’s accomplishments, however, I was slightly disappointed in the fact that Mandela’s character sort of took a back seat in this movie to the story line of the Rugby team. Instead of showing the hardships that Mandela went through before becoming President of the country that imprisoned him for 27 years, Freeman simply plays the part of a Rugby fan, a complete waste of what could have been the perfect character portrayal. You only get to see a small part of the struggles in Mandela's live in the scene with his daughter. That is one of two scenes in which we find out Mandela's family basically disowned him, the other being when one of his new security guards asks Mandela about his family while on his morning walk.

My second complaint with this movie is that no character really went through a blockade, a climax of sorts. I was expecting the Rugby team to have a moment where they would come together as one, facing their struggles and showing that they deserved to be the better team. Almost like the suicide skating drill session that Herb Brooks put the 1980 USA Olympic hockey team through in the movie “Miracle.” Instead Matt Damon’s character simply visited his president, was told that the worst team in the world was to win the world cup for its country, and then they went out and did it, and end of the movie. I was also upset at how Francois Pienaar's family treated their housemaid. All throughout the movie the Francois' father would bash blacks right in front of her, but as soon as the Rugby team made it to the finals, everything was fine and Mr. Francois was happy to sit side by side with his maid.