The film Tom Hanks called the greatest motion picture ever made: “A movie everyone had to go see”
There’s no set answer for which movie can definitively be called the greatest of all time, which is kind of the point. Like all art, cinema is entirely subjective; one person’s treasure can often be another’s trash. In Tom Hanks‘ case, his impressionable mind was so blown by one of his formative big-screen experiences that he couldn’t see past it as the high point of the entire medium.
Of course, just because he’s ‘America’s Dad’, it doesn’t mean everyone is inclined to agree with him. After all, the two-time Academy Award winner is adamant that the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer’s Cloud Atlas is one of the best things he’s ever been in. While there’s no shortage of people who’d be willing to join him on that hill, there are just as many who’d vehemently disagree.
What can’t be argued is that at least a couple of the Toy Story flicks, Saving Private Ryan, Big, Apollo 13, Catch Me If You Can, Cast Away, Forrest Gump and The Green Mile have all been described as classics in one way or another, so Hanks obviously knows how to spot a production that’s going to touch hearts and minds worldwide.
As a lifelong Beatles fan, Hanks thinks A Hard Day’s Night is one of the all-time greats, which is an opinion he’s entitled to. He’s also one of the innumerable icons in Hollywood history who’ve gone on record touting Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as one of celluloid’s finest achievements, which is a difficult point to argue against.
However, a kitschy sci-fi might not be everybody’s cup of tea when it comes to discussing the moving image’s upper echelons, even if it won two Oscars for its groundbreaking visual effects. In Hanks’ defence, he was only ten years old when the far-fetched flight of fancy arrived in cinemas and being part of the target demographic who could easily have their minds blown ensured it left an indelible mark.
“I remember when I was a kid, there was a movie that everyone just had to go and see called Fantastic Voyage,” he recalled to Film Ink. “There were no movies like that. They go in this cool submarine, and they were miniaturised by the magic process, and they were put into a hypodermic needle, and then they stuck the needle into a patient, and they travelled up through the bloodstream.”
His enthusiasm for Fantastic Voyage is as obvious as it is evident, and as a ten-year-old, he was also enraptured by how “Raquel Welch was in this skintight scuba outfit,” which he called “an added bonus.” It had everything he could have possibly wanted, which is why it’s been retained as a core memory. “I remember thinking, ‘This is the greatest motion picture ever made,'” Hanks said as the warm glow of nostalgia threatened to wash over him once again.
