Rhetorical Analysis of We Are Marshall Review

Frank Lovece published a passionate review on the movie, We Are Marshall. Lovece felt
passionate about this movie, since he lived only a few hundred miles from Huntington, West
Virginia where the 1970s tragic plane crash occurred. Including this information of his
connection to the event, discussed in We Are Marshall, helps Loveces review gain sympathy.
That was a smart decision on his part. His review is broadly based on the movie, but he takes
different approaches to speak on it. Lovece mainly focuses on telling the audience what the
movie is based on, about the movies director and he gives his opinion on how he views the
movie. He tells how the movie is about Marshall Universitys football program and how one
plane crash killed many and devastated the entire town. He uses the Yankees baseball program as
a reference, in the place of the football team, to illustrate how tragic the plane crash truly was,
based on how the audience would feel to lose the Yankee Baseball team. He also stated how the
movie is not all about the crash, but the aftermath. Lovece also spoke on We Are Marshalls
director Joseph McGinty Nichol (McG). He stated a previous work done by McG and how he
feels McG did a good job on blending Jamie Lindens script, Cory Helmss story and Lindens
story all into one well connected movie. The review only consisted of the linguistic mode,
making the review not very eye catching to the audience, at first glance. To stumble upon this
review, the audience had to be an actor/actress follower, a curious movie-seeker, another film
critic or they had to be the cast/crew of We Are Marshall. Meaning you would have to be looking
for this review to find it. Once the review is found, I feel it is very persuasive. Based off of
Loveces review the audience would expect to find a movie that was based on the true tragic
1970s plane crash in Huntington, West Virginia. They would expect We Are Marshall to focus
on the aftermath of the event and not just the plane crash. The audience might automatically
consider the idea of football in We Are Marshall, to symbolize the church. This idea may occur in
the audience's mind because in the movie review Lovece implied his opinion that football was a
metaphor for the church in the movie. The way Frank Lovece wraps up his movie review is
brilliant. It is brilliant because he uses the line, The fairy-tale ending, incidentally, really
happened, giving a hint to the audience that this movie has a good ending despite the tragic
beginning. That one line stood out to me the most and I could see it motivating the audience to
go watch We Are Marshall. This review did lack visual design aspect by only providing the
audience with textual information, but overall, I feel this movie review held its purpose of
speaking positively about We Are Marshall and to help motivate people to go watch the movie.

Lovece, Frank. "We Are Marshall." Film Journal International 110.1 (2007): 35-36. Film &
Television Literature Index. Web. 15 Feb. 2017.