Les Miserables Review

Jack Purdy

Les Miserables Review

The name of this story Is Les Miserables.  The story was written by Victor Hugo but the movie was directed by Tom Hooper.  I saw the movie version of this story, which was made in 2012.  The main characters included Anne Hathaway who played Fantine, Hugh Jackman who plays Jean Valjean, Russell Crowe who was the inspector after Jean Valjean, Eddie Redmayne who was Marius, and Amanda Seyfried who played Cosette who was the girl Jean Valjean was taking care of.  This story was about the life of Jean Valjean and the girl he adopts named Cosette.  This story started out with when Jean Valjean finally becomes free from being a slave and runs away from his parole.  Then it moves on to him becoming the leader of a town and he ends up adopting a woman's daughter.  It goes on to show how his parole officer finally finds him and how Jean has to go back to hiding.  It then skips about eight or nine years into the future when he gets his life back.  Finally it goes on about how a rebel fell in love with Cosette and she loves him.  Then Jean finds out and he joins the rebels so that he can save this kid named Marius that Cosette loves.  Which he ends up being successful in doing. Before he saves Marius he saves the Inspector who was chasing him for years.  Which makes the Inspector realise that he really has changed and that he has been the bad one all along and he kills himself.  The story ends with Marius and Cosette getting married and Jean dying.  Some of the Major themes that I noticed were love at first sight, Revolution, and justice.  These themes were expressed through certain characters throughout the entire story.  The theme of love at first sight was expressed through Marius and Cosette.  They showed this because When they first saw each other they made eye contacts and just kept looking at each other and smiling.  Then later Marius finds out where she lives and goes to tell her how much he loves her.  The theme of Revolution was shown through the characters Enjolras and his followers which included Marius.  They created rebel groups who wanted to get rid of the French government system and make the social classes more equal.  The last theme I noticed was Justice.  This was expressed through the Inspector and Jean Valjean.  They showed this because the inspector was trying to catch Jean for the entire movie because he thought that he was still a bad person and then in the end he realizes that Jean has changed and that he has been the bad one because Jean helped to save not only his life but the life of Marius also.  One actor that stuck out was Hugh Jackman.  The main reason he stuck out to me is because I recognized him from other movies.  He was my favorite character because he showed how much a person can change and that people don't stay the same forever.  I felt that he did a great job with his character especially because it was a musical and he had to sing all of his lines which I can imagine is very difficult.  My overall opinion of this story was that it was extremely long and had difficult language to understand not only because it was all singing but it was language from that time period and I didn't really understand some of the stuff they said, but the storyline of it was very interesting and I enjoyed it.