Analysis Of Invictus, People, Places, Events, Society

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Analysis of Invictus
Introduction
. Invictus is a film based on an American and South African biographical sports and drama. The film is directed by Clint Eastwood and is played by Morgan Freeman playing the role of Nelson Mandela. Matt Damon, as a co-starring character who plays as South Africa, rugby union team. Invictus film was released in 2009. The movie is written after the events in the book playing the enemy written by John Carlin. The film focuses mostly on the events that took place in South Africa before and during 1995 Rugby World Cup. Nelson Mandela, the first president of South Africa and who is played by Morgan Freeman is a contributing factor to the struggles of the road to independence. He is leading the country that has been for a long time in two ends, regarding racial discrimination. The Rugby World Cup was held in South Africa, after the disestablishment of the apartheid. The idea of using Springboks as the national rugby team of South Africa was to create a common place and to bring people of all races together, both whites and blacks, minority groups and Afrikaners.
Digging deeper into the details of the film, the theme of apartheid is heavily portrayed Apartheid was a series of laws that were very similar to the Jim Crow Laws of the United States enforced a very strict “separate but unequal” social order. Initially beginning in 1948 when the newly ran Nationalist party, representing the Afrikaners, took office, a lot of changes occurred (Invictus 71). In the 1950’s two laws were passed: the population registration act and the group area act (Invictus 101). . The population registration act classified each individual by race where boards were created to determine the race of a person. The group area act determined what “township or location” (cities on the outskirts of town) individuals of the same race would live (Invictus 131). Moving into the 1960’s, apartheid had gotten worse. In the Land Act of 1913, nationalists were able to enforce a population-wide social project where between 1960 and 1985, 3.5 million Africans were removed by force to rural dumping grounds that functioned as reservoirs for cheap black labor for white employers (Invictus 135).
Connecting the dots between the history of apartheid with the film Invictus and its overall message of unity and seeing beyond colorism, Clint Eastwood did a good job by discussing these lasting issues of racism with imagery. At the start of the film, South Africans were not on board with having the Springboks as their national team because they were a team of 99% white males and their uniforms were representative of the old South African flag when apartheid was still enforced. Later in the film however, the team went to visit some children and played rugby with them while a banner in the background stated “one team, one country”. The flag imagery continued until the end of the film as well when the team was competing; A majority of the fans in the stadium waved around the “new flag of South Africa” representing the post-apartheid country. With these examples of imagery throughout the film, Eastwood addressed the divide between old ways and...