Rhetorical Devices in Action Movies

Today in class we went over some rhetorical devices and literary devices found in action movies. Mr.Rivers started off by talking about Black panther and how almost all action movies have a grand speech. So he showed us a scene from the action movie Independence day; it was the president of the United States giving a speech to the army and maybe civilians how they need to fight together against the aliens or else if they separate the aliens will kill human kind. We were then told to go off in our groups and find any rhetorical devices in the speech. One group found an antithesis which is a sentence with two opposite idea; united we stand, but separate we will fall. To make it a more precise idea of the speech the class revised it to, united, mankind will live, but separate, our world will be destroyed by extraterrestrials. After this Mr. Rivers asked us to find literary devices in the New Orleans speech and explain why it improved the argument of the speech. My example was an anaphora which is when the same phrase is repeated in the beginning of consecutive sentences.  “This is not about politics. It's not about blame. It's not about retaliation. This is not about a naïve quest to solve all of our problems at once.” This rhetorical device helps further the speech's argument because he is establishing that this is not a biased argument and it is just facts that it's wrong to to still have those statues up. Knowing how to use rhetorical devices helps further an argument and make it was more specific. It shows that you can be a trusted source of information and persuade people to be on the same side as you. These rhetorical devices are used all the time in action movies to make people have more of an emotional connection and root for the person giving the speech and using these rhetorical devices.