The Patriot vs. My Brother Sam is Dead

Author's Note: " I needed a piece to score on the writing rubric so I choose to put on my compare and contrast essay that I did for social studies."

When Sam returns home after being away at college for a year and announces to his family he is going to enlist in the Rebel Army his parents are horrified and raged, but his younger brother Tim couldn’t be more excited. With Sam’s father on the King’s side and Sam enlisting in the Rebel army Tim doesn’t know just what side to join. Should he honor his father and be loyal to the King and be a Loyalist or should he fight to be free and be a Patriot? Tim, only being a fourteen year old boy, figures out what he wants and what the danger and excitement of war is really like. The movie The Patriot and the book My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Gollier and Christopher Gollier have a lot in common.

In the movie The Patriot and the book My Brother Sam Is Dead are very similar in the sense that in both of them a family is torn apart by the war. For example in the movie The Patriot the Martin family is split up a lot: one of the boys dies early on in the movie and then the Dad(Benjamin) and oldest son Gabriel go to war leaving Benjamin’s other 3 kids at home with their Aunt. In the book My Brother Sam Is Dead a similar situation happens, Sam Meeker(the eldest brother) makes the decision to enlist in the rebel army despite the fact that his father is a loyalist. Sam leaves his family to go fight with the continental army while his younger brother Tim is left at home with his parents wanting to join the war like his brother. These are two examples of how the Meeker family and the Martin family get split up because of the war.

Even though the separation of family was a big similarity between the movie The Patriot and the book My Brother Sam Is Dead another big similarity between the two was all the killings. In example, in the movie The Patriot The middle son Thomas is shot early on in the movie. Closer to the climax of the movie the eldest son Gabriel is stabbed to death. Also in the movie the British soldiers burnt down the continental governments houses and killed their families. On the very last page of the book My Brother Sam Is Dead Sam dies, the British shoot him repeatedly until he is gone. By reading the book and watching the movie you can see that the British Army were ruthless and spared no one, not even children.  The deaths and killings in the book My Brother Sam is Dead and the movie The Patriot are just one similarity between the two.

Another similarity between the book My Brother Sam is Dead and the movie The Patriot is that in both you really can really see and visualize the effects of war. For example in the movie The Patriot you could see all the deaths and feel the pain they felt. Also in the movie they talked about how war was everywhere and how battles were fought in the people’s backyards. In the book you had to visualize these things but a lot of them were the same. For example in the book they talked about the wounded and what they effects of war did the land and the people who were fighting and even the innocent people who did nothing wrong. The effects of war are very apparent in the book My Brother Sam Is Dead and the movie The Patriot.

The Revolutionary War was not an easy one as you can tell be reading the book My Brother Sam Is Dead by James Lincoln Gollier and Christopher Gollier and watching the movie The Patriot. Some of the similarities between the book and the movie are the visualization of the effects of war, the separation of families, and the death and killings.  While reading the book My Brother Sam Is Dead and watching the movie The Patriot you learn a lot about what war is like and how brutal and ruthless some of the soldiers really are.