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Good Will Hunting - Collector's Edition Customer Reviews (19 - 21 of 65 Reviews)

An old story in a new guise
I enjoyed this movie about a universal genius whose math talents and overall intelligence are truly stratospheric but who apparently has the social and emotional I.Q. of a senile aarvark with syphilitic paresis of the brain. (Actually, that's an insult to aadvarks who probably don't deserve to be compared to the anti-social and unsympathetic Matt Damon character :-)). We do learn in the movie that some of this excusable and understandable due to the abuse he's suffered at the hands of his father, but the naturally pugnacious Matt Damon character is unable to be civil even to those who have nothing but his best interests in mind, such as the eminent math professor who gets him out of jail, takes him under his wing, and personally tutors him, and the therapist, played by Robin Williams.

When a romantic interest is introduced when a beautiful co-ed comes into his life, he manages to be avoid being a complete jerk for at least five minutes of the film. But of course their relationship doesn't work out at first and Will goes back to his old churlish, irresponsible, and wayward behavior, stops meeting with the math professor for advanced math lessons, and so on. Eventually, though, with Robin Williams's help, he comes to the realization that he wants to pursue the relationship with the girl, and leaves town to find her.

We don't get to see how this relationship ultimately works out, but the movie ends on a positive note when he and the girl get back together. Perhaps in that sense the movie is an odd variation on the old theme of the good woman who takes in a strong but rough and uncouth man and finally gentles and civilizes him.

I thought Damon and Williams were both excellent in their roles, and that overall it was an interesting concept for a movie that worked out pretty well despite the Matt Damon character basically being an almost completely unsympathetic one.

By the way, a little academic and perhaps irrelevant footnote here. Despite the stereotype of people with high intelligence often being physically nerdy and socially inept and misfits, this is contradicted by psychological research. A long and detailed study done in the last century by the famous psychologist, Lewis Terman, at Stanford, showed that people with higher I.Q.s are taller, heavier, and better socialized adjusted than those less gifted. So maybe you have to be a really off-the-charts Einsteinian brainiac type of genius like the Matt Damon character for that to happen. :-)

Too cheesy, another Hollywood movie that is silly on Science
Good Will Hunting by Gus Van Sant was hugely sucessful when it came out. It portrayes the life of a poor janitor who is exceptionally talented in mathematics. Matt Damon is emotionally disturbed and tries to push off people coming too close to him. While parts of the movie are OK, there is too much cheesiness in this movie. There are enough mathematicians and logicians lives that are confusing enough as it is. Take the life of Kurt Godel, the Austrian logician. Robin Williams role as the Psychiatryst bringing out Matt Damon was over done. There was no professionalism in the roles. The amount of bad language is also too much for someone connected with such a movie.

As I have seen multiple times, Hollywood is terrible at portraying science and scientists. It shows Matt Damon good at Chemistry, Mathematics, History and Economics. Areas nowadays are so advanced that people have trouble keeping up with parts of one area, there is no way anyone can be a novice at multiple areas let alone an expert. As the mathematician Hardy said after seeing Ramanujan's papers, that he was able to spend considerable time only on Hypergeometric series, as it was close to his heart. Also, it shows the lack of understanding of Mathematics too, the great days of theorem proving are gone, nowadays most mathematical research is spent on developing new areas of math or in connecting seemingly unconnected areas of math. One mathematician, Polya, refused to prove existing areas as he wanted to develop his own areas. I would sincerely hope that directors would take more trouble with their research before starting on such movies. The movie shows something about Fields medals but has no clue of the kind of people who win them, which shows how simplistic it is. Overall, I hope that people who makes movies like this and Beautiful Mind do more work before doing such a silly job.

You call this a movie?
Probably the worst film ever made. Robin Williams, Matt Damon, and Bemn Affleck put on a half A-- performance in this movie about god knows what...and Im not kidding, I really don't know what!?!? Never at any point in the movie does it tell you exactly what it is that Will is hunting. It doesn't even take place in the wilderness with the exception of the scene where Sean is calling out Damon on a park bench. There are a few swans swimming in the pond but they can't be hunting those because it is illegal to hunt swans to begin with. This movie tries to portay Will as some kind of Pimp Daddy by showing his smooth skills while wheeling and dealing Skylar (Mimi Rogers) which for starters doesn't seem like much of a challenge considering I think something was going on with her and the Michael Bolton clone and secondly, I think Will and Sean were gay for each other. If there was a sequel, it would most likely show Will driving back to Boston in that orange disgrace of a pumpkin (car) in search of his true love Sean. Of course America could never accept this which is why Good Will Hunting turned out to be a homophobic mess of mixed up plots. Terrible film, hated it. On a side note, I hate anyone that named their child Skylar following the release of this film.

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