Money is the Ruler

Blinding people with greed is what money does; it engulfs their thought with need and want.  Money is what drives people in the novel Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson to do what they do.  It’s all about a young boy named Jim Hawkins who goes on a hunt for a treasure on a ship with a group of pirates, a doctor named Livesey, and a squire named Trelawney.  For most of the characters, money is a driving force.  In the movie Fast Five directed by Justin Lin, money is also the main incentive.  It’s about a group of fugitives who come together to steal a vault filled with $100 million owned by a man named Reyes whose money is being kept under lockdown at a police station.  There is also a DSS agent in pursuit of many people of the group throughout the movie.  This group of fugitives risks getting caught for money; they have a large chance of getting caught, but they risk it all the same. Continuously throughout the novel Treasure Island and the movie Fast Five, money rules over people’s judgments and lives.
The knowledge of money being involved makes people overlook the fact that their life is being put at risk.  In the novel, Dr. Livesey and Trelawney don’t think about the risks; they just think about the plan to get the treasure.  They put no thought into the matter of their lives.  An example of this is when Jim has given Livesey and Trelawney the treasure map for the first time.  Trelawney starts
blabbering at the sight of the map. “It will amount to this: If we have the clue to talk about, I fit out a ship in Bristol dock, and take you and Hawkins here along, and I’ll have that treasure if I search a year” (Stevenson 36).  This is when they first receive the map, and Trelawney just wants to rush into things; of course, the other two just went along with it.  They spend absolutely no time thinking about the problems they could face; money seems to cloud their reason.  This leads them to take an action that could cost their lives.
Greediness over a thing such as money can lead people to do wretched things in order to get what they want.  The pirates’ main goal is to get the treasure, and the leader of the pirates is the cook named Long John Silver.  An example is that at one point Jim had fallen into an apple barrel, and coincidently overhears Silver talking about his plan to deceive him along with the others who are not in association with Silver.  He is conversing with Israel Hands about him wanting to kill Trelawney and how he calls dibs on him.  “‘Only one thing I claim- I claim Trelawney.  I’ll wring his calf’s head off his body in these hands,”’ (Stevenson 67).  Silver plans to kill all the people on the ship who are not loyal to him and only him.  All Silver wants is the treasure; he will do anything to get it.  He will risk his own life, and take others, for money. Money encourages greed, which incites people in the group to commit murder.
Money influences people’s actions.  In Fast Five, money and greed is what brings these people together.  An example of this is when over much planning and speculation, the group of fugitives plans to break into a police station that is heavily guarded to steal Reyes’s money.  The group rigs up the safe and tears it out of the building using their cars.  Soon after that, they begin dragging the safe throughout the city with police in pursuit.  In the pursuit, they somehow switch the safe for a mock one that the police chase after, and successfully outsmart the police (Fast Five).  This all happens while the real safe is brought back to their place of meeting.  Throughout this, they risk their lives to get money.  They even kill people in the pursuit of it; they let their greed control their actions.  Their want for the money blinds them from the law and what is right.
Money blinds people from realization of their actions and consequences.  In both stories, money influences them, letting the greed take over.  Also in both, the characters take risks, putting them all in danger of getting caught or killed.  Planning is a major thing that takes place in the two stories.  They all make a plan to get their money.  However, the consequences are different; in Treasure Island the people who didn’t succeed got killed.  While in Fast Five, they risk losing everything, going to jail, and being killed.  Money creates fights within both stories with Jim and his group against the pirates and the fugitive group against the police. Throughout the novel Treasure Island and the movie Fast Five, money creates greed, which ends up blinding people of what is right.  Money influences the moralsof a person and is the driving force for one’s actions in life.

Works Cited
Fast Five. Dir. Justin Lin. Perf. Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, and Dwayne Johnson. Universal Studios, 2011. DVD.
Stevenson, Robert L. Treasure Island. N.p.: First Signet Classics, n.d. Print.