12 Angry Men

On November 17th I attended the movie showing of 12 Angry Men. This event was run by SACA for a Common Experience event on campus. 12 Angry Men is a movie about a jury who is supposed to declare a boy innocent or guilty for killing his father. The men go into a room and on the first vote get a result of 11- 1, guilty. The problem with this though is that they can’t tell the judge their decision without it all being for guilty or innocent. The one man who voted innocent tries to explain to the others why he wants to at least give the boy a chance. He talks through all the steps of the night the boy’s father died, and all the reasons why he might have not killed him, to persuade the others to at least give the boy a chance.

I had seen this movie previously to that night, and knew how the ending would turn out. Because I knew how it would turn out, I was able to pay more attention to some of the extra things the characters were doing. I saw how they tried to portray their characters, through their clothing, accents, acting, and simple hand gestures. They were all very distinct and perfect about what they did. Everything about them matched their personality and attitudes perfectly. I have always had a liking of politics and the way government stuff works, so this film was pretty enjoyable to me, but for some friends I had gone with me it wasn’t as much. I was able to see the differences in all of my friends, the rest of the audience and myself. If was kind of nice to see that we all react to things differently in our own special ways. This movie had a great lesson of think before reacting. Many times we just do, or say something without thinking about what it could do to hurt someone else’s feelings. This movie helped place that into perspective. I really enjoyed this movie and recommend for everyone else to see it!