MovieChat Forums > The Last King of Scotland (2007) Discussion > Hated Garrigan!

Hated Garrigan!

posted 7 years ago by Cali7
3 replies | jump to latest

Couldn't they come up with a better protagonist? I mean, what an idiot - from the start, I hated him, from his silly "Whetever you land, that's where you'll go" immature exercise on his globe (I mean, yeah it sucks to live with stodgy parents, but it's not like he lived in poverty or had real struggles, he was an educated doctor for chrissakes), to his completely ignorant disregard of the Gillian Anderson character's marriage (I'm glad she turned him down, BTW!), to sleeping with that random girl on the bus, to seducing and sleeping with a mentally-unstable dictator's wife. Ugh. I understand the writers were trying to paint him as this semi-naive, ignorant young firebrand who gets more than he bargained for when he "befriends" Amin, but come on...I had zero sympathy for this character. And yet, at the end, he's the one that is set free while the far nobler and more interesting David Oyelowo character dies. Smh.

[–] bea37 7 years ago

I liked the movie very much, but kind of felt like you. He was clueless.

[–] mechafi 7 years ago

Why would a more likeable protagonist be a better protagonist necessarily? I don't think that Nicholas was meant to be very likeable, at least I didn't side with him and found him inconsiderate. Mabye he wasn't, in the modern sense, a protagonist at all, just a "main character" of this movie. However, a protagonist actually etymologically and in the classical sense means the "first actor", i.e. the main character of a play.

A play or a movie doesn't have to, at least in my opinion, include a likeable main character/protagonist. An interesting, well-rounded or complex protagonist will do just fine. And I don't think it is necessary for the film to have a "happy ending" where all get their due for it to be enjoyable.

And although I didn't like Nicholas as a person, I did feel a certain pity for him although he got what he was asking for. We've all been young and rash and had our castles in the air crumble to dust. And was the the ending so bad really? The noble character dies a noble death, while the inconsiderate character flees and takes the coward's way out and has to bear the shame for what he did. Isn't this really a story about the colonialism after it was officially gone? The liberal well-meaning hippie-type Nicholas is the "white colonialist" here who gets mixed up in the affairs he doesn't understand and when he should bear the responsibility, he is the one who gets out alive while the African guy is left behind.

[–] marauder1879 7 years ago

He was quick to burn his bridges with the British representatives of the Foreign & Commonwealth office too - in particular Stone, who immediately rubbed Garrigan up the wrong way by referring to him as English.

TBPH, I thought this playing up of cliched, stereotyped UK regional rivalries fell somewhat short of the high standards set throughout the film generally.

Garrigan and Stone were both highly educated and would have conducted their interactions with far greater effectiveness - given where they were, and the potential gains from being on good terms.