Reaction Paper for the movie The Godfather (1972) - Essay Example

Mobsters can sometimes seem more like cartoons than real people. However, there is one movie that sets the bar for what all others would be compared to. That movie is the Godfather, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and it tells the story of the Corleone crime family. The family, as led by Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando), fights for money and power in the grimy and sometimes glamourous world of organized crime. There are three sons, one adopted son, and one daughter in the family. Set in the years following the Second World War, the main plot of the movie is that the Don is given a chance by other mobsters for his family to expand their empire by getting involved in the drug trade.

The Don, however, doesn’t think this is the right thing to do. This makes the other families angry and they begin to prepare for war. The Don along with his sons, Sonny (James Caan), Fredo, and consigliere Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), prepare to do what must be done to preserve the power they have fought so long and hard to have. The youngest son, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) has never been involved in the crime part of the family and isn’t well known to the other families. Everyone thinks he is different.

They think he is a war hero and has no street smarts. He has spent time fighting on a battlefield which is so much different than the political streets of New York. In the end the movie shows he is different: he is better at being a don and a mobster than anyone else. Throughout the movie, the tension between family and crime is constantly explored. The biggest theme that this film deals with is the theme of family, shown in both a literal and metaphorical sense. For me this was by far the most fascinating part of this movie—to see how the various children of the Don have to deal with the pressures of the new responsibilities thrown on them by the war that is underway.

This drama is powerfully represented in the script and