Spielberg Film example essay topic

Steven Spielberg is one of he world's best-known movie makers. His 1993 movie, Jurassic Park, has earned more money than any other movie in history. The gross topped $900 million in less than a year and was heading toward $1 billion with home video and other after-market releases. That surpassed 1982's E. T the extra-terrestrial, another Spielberg film, which had been the top Hollywood moneymaker. Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and The Temple of doom and Close encounters of the Third Kind all are in the top 20. In all his 15 movies have grossed more than $4 billion.

Steven Spielberg's work embodies a whole range of qualities that tell us a lot about Hollywood and the role of movies in our culture. Spielberg's films also represent the glitz and glamour of Hollywood. Most are spectacularly filmed with dazzling special effects, and their box-office success has helped fuel the extravagances that are part of the image Hollywood cultivates for itself. But Spielberg is deeper than that, he entwines observations from his personal life into film commentary on fundamental human issues. The fantasy E. T centers on a boy growing up alienated in a broken home who identifies with the alien E.T. Movie analyst see the boy as a metaphorical stand-in for Spielberg, who was taunted as a Jew when he transferred into a new high school and found himself alienated for something over which he had no control.

Moviegoers entranced by Spielberg's adventure stories sometimes forget his serious works. His 1985 The Color Purple adapted from Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-wining book, was a painful, insightful account of a southern African American family during the first half of the century. Schindler's List, his acclaimed 1993 account of the Holocaust, flows from his own heritage. These movies, some say Spielberg's best, represent the potential of the medium to help us individually and collectively short through the dilemmas of the human condition.

Schindler's List swept the Oscars in 1993, casting Spielberg in a whole new light as a director. Until then, Spielberg's critical success seemed to count against him at Oscar time, and even critics who liked his work for its seamless craft and visceral punch dismissed him as a serious director. Though he had tackled serious themes before, he always seemed uncomfortable with the material, as if he were trying too hard to make a point. All that changed with Schindler's List. The Film, from the novel by Thomas Keneally, has been universally praised as one of the great films of the decade, and with it Spielberg has assured himself a place in film history not only as the highest-grossing director of all time, but as one of the great US, directors of the post-war period.