Cultural Event #5

12 Years a Slave is a movie I've been wanting to see since I first heard about it. It's the story of a freed slave who gets forced into slavery by mistake. As the title suggests, the man was in slavery for 12 years. In those 12 years, he bounced from owner to owner and witnessed the horrors of slavery. The performances from the entire cast were phenomenal. The camera work itself was pretty amazing. Some shots linger on action for a bit and, right before you kinda irritated at the time the camera focuses on one shot, something happens that makes you glad the camera stayed for that long.

This movie is not for weak of heart as it doesn't hold back in showing some of the more brutal aspects of slavery and that's what I have to applaud it for. For almost a century, movies have taken slavery and romanticized it. It showed that slaves weren't being beaten and were almost seen as equals. Gone with the Wind is one of the worst offenders of this and people have thought that's how slavery really was. This film doesn't hold back. Sure, there are the stereotypes of these types of films like the good-heated slave owner who treats who slaves right and the brutal slave owner who breaks slaves, but they are shown in a way that makes you believe that, no matter how good your intentions are, owning slaves doesn't make you a good person. Unlike films like The Passion of the Christ where the violence can be kinda off putting, the violence in 12 Years a Slave doesn't turn you off. Though it makes you feel every shot from a whip, it's how the characters deal with those types of moments that makes you more emotionally invested. Unlike Jesus, this stuff didn't happen just to one person, this happened to many people on a daily basis and was a lot worse than what was depicted on screen.

This is one of those films that most will watch once and then never watch it again for a long time. When someone asked me how it was compared to Roots, I said Roots was a Disney movie compared to this one and I don't mean that as a bad thing. 12 Years a Slave is an important movie because it reminds us of the hell slaves went through and it forces us to look at an extremely dark period in our history.