I am exploring themes in the films Schindler's List and Hotel Rwanda.I have to do an English assignment in which I have to write an essay comparing...

I think that you are on a very good track with the
identification of good and evil in both works.  I would only caution you to clearly
distill the entire dynamic.  Both works really do a good job of exploring that while
good does triumph in the particulars over evil, there is a great deal of evil that does
damage to the belief that good always wins.  In Schindler's List, for example, the film
pulls no punches about the fact that Schindler "could have done more."  He, himself,
admits to this.  The most powerful element of the work is that Keneally, and later
Spielberg/ Zallian, do a great job in exploring how individuals are poised between good
and evil polarities.  It is no accident that Goeth and Schindler are friends.  Within
each, the other sees themselves.  There is much within Goeth that Schindler can see in
his own sense of self.  Granted, at the end, it is clear that one is virtue and one is
evil.  Yet, there are points in both book and film that show an uneasy closeness, almost
intimacy, between both good and evill.  Schindler is such a complex character because
his spiritual redemption is deferred for so long in the work.  It is only later on, when
millions have died, does he awaken to his moral and ethical responsibility as a human
being.  It is important to note this because the Holocaust, like all genocides, are not
morality plays where good triumphs over evil.  They are discourses where we have to
critically examine where individual action lies in the face of a world that is morally
vague or silent to injustice.

This is probably where you
would think about going with Hotel Rwanda. In both works,
individuals, the protagonists, must undergo tremendous tests and overcome significant
inertia in order for good to be done.  Both films reflect the difficulty that good faces
in overcoming evil.  At the same time, while we might cherish and revel in the fact that
both Oskar Schindler and Paul Rusesabagina represent the very best of humanity in what
they did, the films remind us of two harsh accompanying realities.  The first is that
while these individuals are heroic, their works have to be placed in the context that so
many more were not as fortunate and so many more were silent or active collaborators
with the forces of evil.  The second truth that accompanies each is that they were the
minority of humanity at the time period.  For each hero, there were many more who failed
to join them in a collective effort or show of solidarity.  This might be the ultimate
message to us, the audience, in ensuring that we do not replicate the same sins that
these heroes' contemporaries displayed.