Seven

For this report I choose the movie Seven. This movie was released back in 1995 and stars Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, Gweneth Paltrow, R. Lee Ermey, John McGinley, and Kevin Spacy. Seven was directed by David Fincher and written by Andrew K. Walker.

The movie begins with the usual old cop, who is about to retire, and teams up with a young, ready to take on the world cop. The first act begins promisingly, with two cops being assigned to their first case together. One is white and the other is black and they have vastly different investigative styles. Each murder, being investigated by Lieutenant William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) and Detective David Mills (Brad Pitt), is based on one of the Seven Deadly Sins, which are Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Envy, Wrath, Pride and Lust. The detectives find an enormously fat man who is forced to eat himself to death-Gluttony. The detectives discover a high profile lawyer who is made to cut off a pound of flesh for Greed. They find hooker who has been killed by having sex with a man that we will just say's wearing an apparatus on his body for Lust. A runway model is forced to choose death or disfigurement for Pride. Sloth was a man that had been tortured for a whole year. He had been barely kept alive and his hand had been cut off for his fingerprints. He is the only victim that does not die but is a complete vegetable in such a fragile state that he would be better off dead. For envy and wrath we will come back to in a bit.

The killer's (Kevin Spacy) motivation is not to commit evil but, in a very twisted way, to set a moral lesson. This is the main root of the movie. All the characters have an extremely different view of the world. David Mills (Brad Pitt) the young, idealistic cop. He has seen too many movies, swears too much, wears a leather jacket, and refers to himself in the company of his wife (Gweneth Paltrow) as Serpico. Mills believes that people are either good or evil or insane and that it is the responsibility of the good to root out the evil. William Somerset, (Morgan Freeman) who is about to retire, believes that absolute tolerance and indifference have become the great religion of the urban world and that "not caring" has become a way of life. His retirement is not just a gimmick, but is the culmination of his philosophy.

The differences between these two men are two sides to a moral question they debate throughout the course of the film. The deck may be stacked in the older cop's favor however; the city in which they work is a masterpiece of gloom. The younger

...