The Longest Ride

The Longest Ride

The romance drama, The Longest Ride, was directed by George Tillman and written by Nicholas Sparks (Novel). It was released in April 2015 and stars Scott Eastwood, Britt Robertson and Melissa Benoist. The film is about a young couples relationship intertwining with a past relationship of the old man they start to become friends with. The film has themes of Love, Death, Masculinity and Loyalty. 

Nicholas Sparks's style is very clear through out the whole film. Typically, Sparks's stories do not contain a human antagonist which is evident in this film. The screen play was written by Craig Bolotin but the film still is heavily influenced by Spark's style. The main antagonist in this film is the interests of both Sophia (Britt Robertson) and Luke (Scott Eastwood). Sophia is moving is planning on moving away to go to fulfil her dreams of working with in the art world and Luke is a bull fighter who has risked his life one to many times. This is significant because their contrasting lives both bring them together and pull them apart. This means that the audience doesn't have an physical antagonist that they can blame for everything going wrong. 

Another important aspect in the film is how the story of the old mans (Ira) relationship is told. The use of flashbacks is used to not only bring Ira and Sophia closer together but to show the similarities to the audience between the old relationship and the new relationship. The flashbacks allow the audience to see the parallels between the two generations which is important because there are two stories that are going on at the same time. Also by seeing Ira's old life means that when it gets to the end of the film and we see why a specific painting is so important to Ira the audience is able to understand the emotions. The flashbacks (editing) is important in this film because it helps the audience to visualise how similar the stories are rather than being told they are similar. The audience can work out the connections themselves.