RReview of ‘This is England’
‘This Is England’ is a movie directed by Shane Meadows. The film takes place in the summer of 1983 in England. Margaret Thatcher rules the country and problems such as poverty and unemployment is affecting England. The plot takes place during the Falkland wars (The war where the main character of the movie, Shaun lost his father) He lives alone with his mother in what we would call poverty or the working class. They don’t have much money so he has to wear pants that are way too big for him. He gets bullied in school for his clothes and doesn’t seem to have any friends. On his way home from school, Shaun meets a group of skinheads, led by a guy named Woody. They let him join their group and soon Shaun looks like the rest of the group, his head gets shaved, he gets doctor Martens shoes and jeans with red braces and of course a Ben Sherman shirt. The group lives on the edge of the law and runs around destroying houses and smoking a lot of hash. Shaun finds a punk girl named Smell and he falls in love with her. The group soon changes a lot when the racist skinhead named Combo is released from prison. He returns the group. He tells the group about his ideas and ends up dividing the group. He made Shaun stay using manipulation; saying that he needed to fight back for his dead father. Combo becomes a bit of a father figure for Shaun and Shaun thinks it cool to be a part of the ‘big boys’. The group sees themselves as nationalist and not racists. The working class has so poor conditions that they try to find their scapegoat. The scapegoat is of course the immigrants. Shaun of course does what the group tells him to do and he isn’t thinking of the consequences. They end up threatening a group of Jewish boys and a man in a local shop. Suddenly he gets involved in a murder when Combo attacks the immigrant Milky from the skinheads group. Shaun now realizes that it isn’t for fun anymore and gets scared.
The film ends when Shaun throws the English flag in the water, as a kind of symbol, that he is over the skinhead group and that he wants to start over again, without judging people who are not from England.
The town that they live in is a small community for the working class. People don’t really trust each other. It’s every man is the architect of his own fortune.
Shaun goes through a lot in the movie. Shaun starts with being a sweet, strong and independent boy. He doesn’t care about what people say about him and he stands up for himself. Then he meets the group of skinheads and now he isn’t so sure of himself anymore. They say that if he wants to be a part of them, he have to get new clothes. He also has to cut his hair, and Shaun does all these things to be a part of the group. When he finally becomes one of the others he begins to tease Tubbs who is also in the group, so the other boy thinks that he is cool. He forgets to think about when it was him, who was being teased. When Shaun meets Combo he also stands up for himself against Combo. When Combo talks about the war where Shaun’s father died he shouts and hit Combo. When Milky gets murdered he becomes a grown up. He can think for himself. He won’t just be the boy who does what he is told to, just to get accepted by the elder boys. He gets over the loss of his father when he throws the flag in the water. He won’t stand up for his father anymore if it means that he has to beat up people. He now knows what wrong and right is. He isn’t angry for his father’s dead. He has accepted it and has become even more independent.
The message is that you should not have prejudices, and that it’s completely all right to come from another country than the one you live in.
I think the movie was alright. They had a lot of accent, so it was a bit hard to understand. The movie was a bit different from other racist movies but it was okay. On a scale from one to ten I would give it a 7.