Forrest Gump, one of the best movies ever

One of those movies that I watch over and over again and I don't get tired of is Forrest Gump. Perhaps this quality is what makes this 1994 film to be among the best movies ever made. 

Forrest Gump is a man who is not very bright so to speak which is why many of the people around him believe him to be stupid. Forrest might be retarded but his heart and his spirit are ten times bigger than anyone else's. We meet Forrest when he is a child, we see the extraordinary mother he has, we witness the problems he has since then because the other kids mocked himall the time  and also how he met the girl he would love forever. Forrest is apparently also quite lucky and while he never tries the way he is opens a lot of opportunities to him which he grabs always inadvertently and thereforein the story we see how he becomes a college football star, goes to Vietnam and survives, becomes a Ping Pong international champion, enters the shrimp business and becomes rich, gets to meet important people such as John Lennon and president Kennedy, meets his love again several times and becomes the father of a handsome little guy.

Forrest's story is strongly connected to that of his country, to be more precise to the period beginning in the early forties until the early eighties, moments in which the United States was an active player of World History. Forrest is seen interacting with real people long dead and it looks pretty real thanks to the special visual techniques used for this film. This also means that by watching Forrest Gump you actually get to learn a little bit of History.

But more than how fabulous the story is, the special effects or the big actors (Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump, Sally Field as his mother, Gary Sinise as the man who becomes his best friend called Lieutenant Dan, and Robin Wright as Jenny, his all-time love) it is the charracters and what happens to them throughout the story. They all go beyond the linear characgterization and become so multidimensional you actually care for them as though they were real. My favorite is Lieutenant Dan who wanted to die in the Vietnam war but is saved by Forrest and hates Forrest for it. He lost his two legs from the knee down and does not know what to do with his life but he comes to appreciate Forrest in the most unlikely way: one day he joins Forrest in his shrimping business which was not going well. During a storm Lieutenant Dan "talks to God"and says: "You call this a storm?" But it turns out the storm destroys all the other ships but not Forrest´s so they are finally successful. Forrest eventually leaves the business to Lieutenant Dan who decides to invest the money in a computer company and both become insanely rich. The best character of the movie is him.

There is much more to this production than what is said here. Its magic lies perhaps in the fact that it never stops being fresh because it is so human that its message touches us all in many different ways. A must see, really.

In the scale of one to five this one is so significant it easily deserves a seven.