A Movie Worth Watching

Rating: 8/10 (6 February 2016)

As a film student who wants to make films of his own, I had to watch Citizen Kane. The greatest movie of all time? A masterpiece? Well I wouldn't say that it's the greatest movie of all time. However it is worth a great deal. It's a movie with a central theme you see in a lot of cinema, television, and novels of the past few centuries (it is a very common theme you could apply to anything really). However Citizen Kane does it in a very unique way. The film centers around a man who's been given everything in his life. His education, his fortune, and his pride. All of these things were gifted to him by the choice of his Mother. Seeking to give her son a better life after discovering she owned a wealthy gold mine, he is ripped from a quaint life in the west to a life of riches and (as mentioned before) higher education and class. The film centers around "Rosebud", the point of stability that Kane uses in his older years to remind him of a different time. And one man's quest as to what Rosebud means. Ultimately the quest for Rosebud is abandoned, as only the man himself might know what it means. It is discovered at the end that it is his sled that was named Rosebud the whole time (I kinda had a hunch at the beginning after he is gifted a new sled to replace it at the beginning of the film). What this means to me is Kane looking back on older, better times. Before his life was made more complicated. Kane states at the beginning that he's close to what he wanted to be, but that he'd rather have earned what he made. Kane wanted love in his life because he was deprived of that when he was young. He would've rather spent life with people who loved him, that he loved in return. Rosebud is the trust between his family and him, something he lost when he was taken from them to a different life. Perhaps the life of a different man. Rosebud is everything that Kane lost, and perhaps more. Overall the movie holds up pretty well for its age. This movie isn't the greatest of all time, because there is no greatest film of all time. Every film has something to offer to different people, and you won't find the same thing in every film. However Citizen Kane is a film I recommend you see at least once, just so that you can decide for yourself if Kane is right for you.