[KenWittlief]

Ive thought about this all day on and off before replying.

Most movies are fiction, made up stories. In that catigory I cant think of a single one that had any real effect on my life. You cant base your life on fiction, because the situations and results are contrived for entertainment purposes, and they do not correlate to reality.

But there have been several excellent movies that were more or less documentaries, and some of these have affected me deeply:

Private Ryan is said to be an accurate protrayal of what it was like to be a soldier in WW2. My father was in Pattons 3rd army, and fought in the battle of the buldge. He never talked about it much, and when he did it upset him deeply. I gained a lot of insite into my father's life after seeing Saving Private Ryan.

In a similar way the movie Gettysburg portrayed the insanity of the civil war. Ive been to the town recently, and its very depressing to contemplate the loss of life that happened there in only 3 days, and to come to terms with the war as a whole. I know we say now the war freed the slaves and saved the union, but I think we could have accomplished those things without hundreds of thousands of americans blasting each other into hamburger with grape-shot from cannons, musket balls, and hacking each other to death with bayonets and swords.

The movies Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff gave a wonderfull insite into the lives of the people who made our space program possible, and gave me great inspiration as an engineer.

And I have to include Shindler's List. We dont like to face the dark side of our human nature, but its there. If we dont accept who we are as a species, we will continue to repeat the horrors of our history.