Tom Hanks and Amazing Special Effects

Rating: Null/10 (25 June 2000)

"Forrest Gump" dominated 1994. The film was a box office smash and won six Academy Awards. Tom Hanks (in his second Oscar winning performance consecutively) plays a simple man with an IQ of 75 who is somehow involved with every major American event from the mid-1950s to the early-1980s. Through his journey we meet his mother (Sally Field), his one true love Jenny (Robin Wright), his friend from the army Bubba (Mykelti Williamson), and his commanding officer Lieutenant Dan (Gary Sinise in an Oscar-nominated performance). Gump is thrown into every significant event through amazing visual effects and editing techniques. "Forrest Gump" is an outstanding achievement in the cinema from every point imaginable. The cast is great and so are the mind-blowing visual effects which are still unbelievable six years later. Robert Zemeckis, a Steven Spielberg disciple, became a household name with this film. The screenplay is based on a book that was hardly read by anyone before this film came out in 1994. It was the best film of 1994 and, with the exception of "Schindler's List", may be the best and most important film of the 1990s. The fact that it won the Best Picture Oscar over "Pulp Fiction" and "The Shawshank Redemption" just adds to the greatness of this outstanding motion picture. 5 stars out of 5.