Crash Review

Crash was written and directed by Paul Haggis. The film was released through Lions Gate in 2004 and won an Academy Award for Best Picture.
The creative techniques of this film were that they made it Pulp Fiction style (multiple people in different situations) and the constant foreshadowing and suspense and twists. Both made the film enthralling and kept me interested. For example, when Don Cheadle's mom says to tell the brother to come home, then Cheadle finds a dead black guy and it turns out to be his brother. Or when the black woman is violated by the policeman, and then the policeman gets a call about a car flipped over and leaking gas, and then it turns out to be the same woman and they finally put that behind them and get her out of the car before it explodes.
The audience was meant for adults, what with all the language and brief nudity. But I think it was made to make you think. Especially about what you say and how you perceive things based on race and bias.
Crash was all about racism and stereotypes. It was showing how people of all races treat each other. For example, an Asian woman rear-ends a Latina. When talking to the police, the Latina even says, "could you put in your report how shocked I am at the race of the woman who rear-ended me?" And in another scene, a thief played by Ludacris talks about how even when white people see a black man that doesn't look threatening or like a gang bangers, white people look away and hold tighter to loved ones. Of course, they prove the stereotype true by robbing a white couple for their Lincoln Navigator. Or when a white off-duty cop gives a black guy a ride, and the black guy sees a religious symbol on the dash and the black guy reaches for his pocket and the white man says quite snappy, "what are you reaching for?!" The black guy shouts, "you want to see what's in my pocket?!" and the white guy, freaking out, pulls his gun and fires, only to see that in the black man's dead cold hand was the same religious symbol. It was hard to watch at times to see basically how we are as a sinful people and how we treat people who are different from us.
I personally think the purpose of this message is to show how rampant and ruthless racism is. Though slavery and such has been abolished, there's still hatred among every race towards another. It needs to be addressed or we're going to destroy each other.
God wasn't too big of a part of this film, though the scene where the Persian man comes to shoot the locksmith really caught my eye. Previously, the locksmith had given his five-year-old daughter an imaginary unpenitrable cloak, and when the Persian man pulls a gun on the locksmith, the daughter runs out to her father and leaps into his arms. At that instant, the Persian man pulls the trigger, and the locksmith, thinking his daughter has been shot, screams out in agony. the man with the gun goes into a miniature shock thinking he's killed a little girl. After a few seconds, the daughter says, "It's okay, Daddy. I'm wearing the cloak." Upon hearing that, the locksmith checks the girl for a wound, finding nothing. Neither he nor the man with the gun can believe it. Later on, the man with the gun is sitting in his store when his daughter comes in. He tells her the whole story and claims it to be a miracle. The daughter expresses somewhat happy feelings and takes the gun away and puts it back in the drawer. When doing this, the camera shows the ammunition and reveals that all along she had bought her father blanks. That made me laugh. It was funny how though God didn't directly deflect the bullet, he kind of worked through the daughter to know her father and buy blanks.
Overall, Crash was a very powerful and meaningful movie. I recommend it.

-Andrew Cortez