Film Essay

I wish I would have received feedback on this paper before the portfolio and blog was due. I was not able to make any changes in time due to the instructor not returning it to me in time.

Frank Keeney 

English 102

Leslie Jewkes

03/20/2011

Rainforests and the “Medicine Man”

            The Amazon rainforest is the largest rainforest in the world.  A rainforest is the most diverse ecosystem in the world.  In recent years, it has been a prime ground for logging and creating more agriculture lands for people to sustain life. But the rainforest has the potential to produce new medicine for the world, with two million acres in canopy in the rainforest; there are so many possibilities for researchers to find new medicines that could be used to cure many illnesses across the world today. The Amazon rainforest is a very diverse place and this diversity can lead to many new discoveries in the world today.

            With the rainforest being depleted by deforestation, it is taking away many diverse ecosystems that the world needs to be healthy.  “Deforestation is the conversion of forested areas to non-forested areas. The main sources of deforestation in the Amazon are human settlement and development of the land” (Wikipedia). The film that I am going to be analyzing is “Medicine Man” made in 1992 starring Sean Connery and Lorraine Bracco. It was about a doctor who had been living in the Amazon rainforest researching for medicine that he linked to curing cancer in the local tribe he lived with, which the tribe then referred to him as a “medicine man”.  A new female doctor came to determine what he was doing with his research and the pharmaceutical company’s money and to shut him down, though she was not aware of his discovery. Once she realized what he discovered, but that he only had a small portion left of the serum and that he could not duplicate it, they teamed up with the tribe to find the source.  When they finally realized what the source was, it was too late and the forest was getting torn apart, logged, and burned for new roads. Along with some relational plots, there were a few points made about the rainforest and the effects of logging that diverse ecosystem within the movie.  This film is relevant to my chosen topic of Environmental Impacts and sustainable resources due to the setting of the movie and some of issues in the underlying subplot of the movie.

 I believe the director of this movie was trying to get the word out about the damages that was happening in the Amazon rainforest and also the possibilities that the rainforest has for the medical field and other unknowns in the world. Another message the movie gave was the effect of a different cultures inhabiting an area such as the rainforest, had the potential of bringing diseases into an area that had never been seen before. This can cause a very large epidemic to the tribe because the tribal peoples’ immune systems have never seen the diseases or even the common cold.  It could have the potential to completely take out the whole tribe. “Epidemics of small pox, measles and even the common cold devastated many Indian populations” (Bennett 2010). I believe the director was also trying to get this point out in the movie, showing that even people like us could cause extreme damage to the cultural side of the rainforest just by a common cold.

            With logging and illegal logging cutting roads into the rainforest, it is already creating problems for the local tribes because they are seeing the water slowly deplete in those areas. The local tribes are being forced to move from their homes and seek new areas to raise their families and find new sources of food. I think the director was trying to tell the audience that if we do not stop logging in the rainforest, that it will not only take away any chance of new cures being found, but also we will be ruining the lives of the tribal people that call the rainforest their home. “During the past 40 years, close to 20 percent of the Amazon rainforest has been cut down—more than in all the previous 450 years since European colonization began.”(National Geographic).

I think that the director of this film was also trying to let the world know what opportunities there could be in the rainforest. With the rainforest being depleted so fast, the producer of the movie is also trying to let people know that it is already affecting the rainforest by water depletion and by ruining the ecosystem that is in existence right know.

            Overall I believe that the director of this film was just trying to let the world know how things can affect the rainforest. From the common cold to developing just a single road and this is why, we as a people need to be more aware that the smallest things can completely take out an ecosystem. I also believe that the director of the movie was trying to teach the viewers a lesson on how we can cause great havoc on an ecosystem by logging and just having the mere presence of people from the outside world.  The Amazon rainforest is a very diverse place and is the largest ecosystem in the world and with endless possibilities.

            Work Cited

Bennett, Tiffany.  “What Is the Human Habitation of the Amazon Rainforest?” eHOW.com, 9     July 2010. Web. 18 March 2011.

“Deforestation.” Wikipedia. Web. 12 Feb. 2011.

“Farming the Amazon.” National Geographic. 17 March 2011.

Medicine Man. Dir. John McTiernan. Perf. Sean Connery, and Lorraine Bracco. Buena Vista Pictures Distribution. 1992. DVD.