University of the Philippines Manila

SCHOOL OF HEALTH SCIENCES

Palo, Leyte

AMIGO
(Reaction Paper)

Amigo is a 2010 American-Filipino drama film written and directed by John Sayles.

The film takes place in the Philippines in 1900 during the Philippine–American War. This
movie shows how good historical film it is. And the whole cast had a great performances
especially the local actors and actresses. The settings are also realistic, it would definitely
shows the places here in the Philippines.

The film “Amigo” wants us to realize the social classes and people that were in
Philippines during that time. It ranges from Spanish military, United States Americans,
Chinese Migrants and the local Filipino, each social classes has different role in the movie.
Well, as you can observe in the movie, the Filipinos are only a slaves during that time even
the Mayor in that small village has nothing to do, he’s just being treated as a slave also. It
also shows in the movie, how religious Filipino is, they were really worship Saints where
some Filipinos also adapted that kind of characteristic nowadays, especially Catholic
Religions.

The film presented how brutal the reality before, if you have no any ranks in the
society then your life was something like own by others, you have no right for anything
seems like you are in prison during that time. No democracy at all. In the film we can easily
differentiate the two main sides that were presented, the American and the Filipino side. It
is obvious that United States was the rising power in the world, so basically Americans had
an advance technological superiority in terms of weapons, tactics and even logistics and
communications. While, on the other hand, the Filipino especially the armed force only had
a native weapon or we can say it wasn’t technological than the Americans weapon. And to
be honest, American was more brilliant in terms of strategies, tactics and more expert in
war.

But for me, the highlight of this film is that Filipinos have no unity. In the movie it
shows that also Filipino to Filipino was the enemy, they betrayed each other that’s why
they ended up losing their freedom and independence from the invading Americans.
Actually I’m a bit disappointed this film but the film only wants us to show reality during
those times. Its biggest fault is a story that left us wanting and wanting for more and by the
end of the film, all we could say was "that was it, really?”