2nd Movie You Must See Before You Die: The Great Train Robbery

Thomas Edison is an inventor that, all though his "contributions" have been questioned, did have a monumental impact on the way films were made in America; from creating the first film studio, his Black Maria, the first film exhibition device, the Kinetoscope, and even basic film techniques like close-ups, composite editing, and shooting on location, as is the case with The Great Train Robbery.

The plot is as simple as they come, robbers hijack a train, then a posse chases them and kills them. The End. Oh and one of the bandits shoots the audience. Now we're really in the action.

Much like A Trip To the Moon, The Great Train Robbery is an example of not just pure cinema but cinema of a very specific genre, Western in this case. Also like A Trip to the Moon, It truly benefits from its time period, when something as simple as this could be considered groundbreaking, with all the techniques that were previously mentioned. Movies like this remind us that sometimes something as basic a scenario can be enough to fulfill the simple desire for adventure, thrills, heroism, and the all-American genre that comes with all that.

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