The Old Man and the Sea

I watched the Old Man and the Sea at school for English and I thought it was okay. The plot seems real enough but there is fault in the characters. I read the book and expected that they would make changes, so finding that the old man had a daughter was not a shock to me, but her bad acting contributed to reason this movie was not such a hit. Also Santiago was supposed to be Cuban yet this actor's accent was horrible and he wasn't Cuban. I even heard that he was a famous actor back then and that is why he got the part. Some of the flashbacks were also not in the book which I understand but some had nothing to do with the plot of the story. Santiago was supposed to dream of lions on the beach but instead he dreams of his youth. There were also some good points though, the actor who played Santiago was very good and so was the boy also adding the author of the book into the movie was genius. The big blue marlin at some point looked fake, and the background of the sea, also fake. The scenery of the beach was beautiful though, and it kind of reminded me of my home country. In book and movie, Santiago shows the endurance courage and compassion for the fishes he catches and that is probably what drew people to watch it the first time but know it is not all that popular anymore and would not be a good choice to pick if you wanted to see a good movie. For ratings I would give this movie a four out of ten for good effort even though it really did suck.

Not much actually happens in this movie: an old man Santiago (Anthony Quinn) has not caught a fish in over eighty trips, goes out for one last trip and catches a huge fish. By doing so, he discovers, perhaps for the first time, the insignificance of human beings in the overall scheme of things. It is a testament to Anthony Quinn's performance in the central role that our interest is sustained; his range of facial expressions is positively wondrous, especially when alone on the boat with no one but himself to talk to. Director Jud Taylor also works hard to develop the spring-and-autumn relationship between Santiago and the boy Anderez (Paul Calderon), which prompts the old man to consider his own behavior as an old men when he believed that he was virtually impregnable. The story has a Hemingwayesque figure in the form of Tom Pruitt (Gary Cole), a writer who cannot leave Santiago's small community until he has discovered for himself just what motivates the old man. This role is a little superfluous, but at least shows why the author himself was interested in such an apparently insignificant story.

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I'm a freshmen student who watched the movie Old Man And The Sea I think the movie's graphics weren't all that good. The plot was good, but the graphics were horrible. Every thing looked fake, especially the marlin. Other than that the movie was good. They didn't make many changes, and the changes they did make, made the movie better not worse. The actors did their job pretty good and they were convincing. For example when the old man was out to sea looking for the fish and talking to himself he was saying things with a lot of feeling. Or the part when he was saying that he had to kill the fish even though he loved it and respected it. Then when he was asking himself if it was right to kill the fish he put enough real emotion in there to convince the person watching that he was actually there. The actors looked like I imagined they would look. Except one, the daughter Angela. They stuck to the book and how they said stuff and what they said so it was actually a good book in terms of the plot, if you can get over the fake graphics than it's a fairly good movie.

I saw the movie The Old Man and the Sea in school after my class read the book. I did not really like the movie because some of the actors couldn't act at all. For example, the woman that played Angela was a bad actress that made the movie look even worse than it already was. The woman Angela also looked a lot like a man instead of a woman. The movie was very different from the book because the movie was way shorter. In the book the old man Santiago didn't have a daughter but in the movie he did. Ernest Hemingway was not mentioned in the book as an actor. In the story it was sad when Santiago arrived back on land and he went to his shack; the boy come to the shack to see if he had arrived back home. But then again in the movie Santiago arrived in his boat with the fish tied to the side and people were gathering around and telling him what a magnificent fish he caught. The islanders then said that all of his bad luck was gone because he had caught such a fish in the 85th day. During the movie parts were missing that should have been there. That just made me not like the movie that much more. The new parts added to the movie didn't add to the meaning of the story because it had kind of the same meaning even without the new parts. In a way the movie kind of helped me understand the book a little better because I got to really get a good picture of all the surroundings and the feel of the book. For some parts of the book that was hard for me to picture in my head I was able to understand what the book was trying to explain and make me see.

This was not a film worthy of Tony Quinn. It pales when compared with the Spencer Tracy version. The Quinn effort did not follow the book except a little. People were brought in for some unknown reason who were not in the book and didn't add anything to the story line. The original was a LOT better and followed the book almost to the letter. I realize that the original version was become hard to find, but I bet a look on ebay, Google, or Amazon would turn up a copy. I think that you would really enjoy it. I have a copy of the original Spenser Tracy version and plan to watch it with the book in hand to see how close it is to the book