The Birth of a Nation (2016)

Waste of time

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

While this movie was based upon real-life events, the movie was released at a time when our country was (and still is) very racially divided (2016). The folks who made this film clearly were trying to toss gasoline on the race fire. They wanted to demonize white males for slavery, and in my opinion to agitate blacks who watched the movie.The Nat Turner rebellion occurred a long time ago (1831), and this film portrayed all white slave owners (except white women) as extremely cruel & openly evil against their slaves. It goes without saying that slavery was, and is, awful -- which is why white folks are the only ones who abolished it. However, brutally murdering white folks in cold blood is far worse, and the movie was told from the vantage point that brutally murdering random slave owners was completely justified. The final scene in the movie morphs into a group of black Union soldiers fighting the Civil War, and there's not a white male to be seen fighting. Nor is there any mention that white males in the US government were the ones ultimately responsible for abolishing slavery, and a great many white males gave their lives fighting the Civil War.If you're tired of watching movies that demonize white males, I wouldn't suggest that you watch this. All of the black slaves were portrayed as intelligent, articulate, well spoken, and well mannered, but the white males were portrayed as unkept, dim-witted, and evil.The acting was decent, but it was clear that the script was clearly manipulating the viewer's emotions to push a one-sided agenda.

I'll qualify my review by saying that I was raised in the Deep South by my parents, who were prejudiced Caucasians, and that because of their influence there was always a part of me that felt we were better than people of darker skin tones. That part of me didn't completely die until I was already in my 30s, and I would go as far as to say that a large percentage of Southern "white" children, especially those born before the latter two decades of the 20th century (I was born in 1963), had prejudice to fight off, rethink, and come to terms with. I have heard horror stories from other Southern "whites" that I will not repeat here, but let it suffice to say that a hatred of Blacks is alive and well, if diminishing. I hope it's diminishing anyway. So, what about this film? 12 Years A Slave was riveting, but this one did it for me in a way that no other slavery film has to date--and I've seen most of them, and a few handfuls of Civil War films to boot. The take-away from films like this one is that there is really nothing to fear from the "other." Now I do realize that European Caucasian culture somehow developed the idea centuries ago--Elizabethan times if not long before (where Blacks were called Blackamoors)--that Caucasians are somehow more intelligent than people born on the African continent. They claim they get this information from the Bible, but I have actually studied that book from cover to cover for nearly 50 years, and nowhere in it does it say that those of the Hamitic line are less of anything than those of the Japhetic or Semitic lines. So Ham made a mistake 45,000 years ago and had sex with his own mother while they were all drunk? So what. The child's name was Canaan, and he was born perverted and cursed. Ham was never cursed. Yes, he was shunned by his two brothers, but there was no curse lain on him for his actions. And, even if there had been, is this to say that everyone allegedly of his bloodline would be cursed. What we are really talking about here is pseudo- intellectual bull malarkey drummed up by European "whites" so they could have somebody work for their lazy royal arses. After all, as we moved into the Colonial era, there were very few Caucasians left to tend the fields of the wealthy. You see, they had all been sent off to various wars and killed. What to do? Enslave Africans, of course. All that said, there is no support in all of the Bible for slavery after Saint Paul begins to dismantle the slavery system by introducing a societal leveler, being Christianity--where, ideally and the way it should work, you don't get to be rich and you never have to be poor. And you certainly never have to be a slave--except a willing slave to Jesus, which is quite a different thing altogether. When I am crucified in that particular system, it is my choice, not the choice of some inconsistent and often sadistic master. God help every soul who has died with hatred in their hearts for the Black man and woman. The Judgment is still yet to come.

It's quite strange to fathom at the time of writing, that many months on from the initial hype of The Birth of a Nation's Sundance appearance, where now controversial actor/director Nate Parker found his film to be an early year Oscar contender, that this film was ever talked about seriously as a film worthy of taking home golden statues and becoming a box office hit and after a lacking awards season and a box office run that barely saw the film make back its marketing costs, it seems as though The Birth of a Nation noise was just that and nothing more.It's hard to pinpoint just how much of an effect Parker's past misdemeanours or cloudy background had on Birth of a Nation's ability to transform the Sundance hype (where it was sold for a record amount of money to its distributor Fox Searchlight) into anything substantial and its likely it did play a large part in hampering its potential as a film audiences flocked to but at the end of the day it's also likely that those initial vocal supporters of the film realised that this Parker passion project in which he directs, writes, stars in and produces just isn't that accomplished of a film.The true story at the heart of Nation, that of slave preacher turned rebellion leader Nathanial Turner is a worthily famous one and while Parker and his co-writer Jean McGianni Celestin have taken certain liberties with the story for cinematic purposes, Nation just never gets us totally committed to the goings on in the narrative from Turner's romance with fellow slave Cherry, his commitment to God and the Bible or his eventual rebellion, they all feel like components of the film we should feel more for and while there's horrific scenes playing out before us (Parker should be commended for showing the true atrocities of the time and not shying away from them) that certainly aren't for the faint of heart, Nation's inability to connect us emotionally is a failing that can't be overcome.Much of this blame must be placed at the feet of Parker who has taken years to get this story to the big screen, his direction lacks polish with some uneasy surreal dream sequences and visions in particular shoddily done, his acting a little too forced and script work lacking in polish and had he perhaps handed over more control to another it may've allowed him time to nail the core of this story that feels half-baked, a college film masquerading as a Hollywood quality drama.Final Say – An important story to be told, a film with some strong individual moments and one that in the face of recent Hollywood controversies surrounding lack of diversity and colour representation a timely story too boot, Birth of Nation should never have been spoken about in the same sentence as Academy Awards and while this long gestating Parker project showcases certain abilities for the budding filmmaker/actor, there's still a long road for him to take before he makes a truly awards worthy film and a road likely that not remains blocked for him forever due to a past that will shadow him in Hollywood for the remains of his career.2 ½ uncomfortable sermons out of 5

The movie was just "ok". Pretty much what I expected in a "slave movie"- brutal whippings, white males raping at will, and a lot of turning a blind-eye rationalizations by the "good ol white folk." What's "typical" is the response from certain reviewers (read:white) who seem hung up on Nat Turner's actions rather than the REASON why he acted the way he did. These reviewers are aghast that the real rebellion resulted in the deaths of "innocent" white women and children of slave holding families YET they conveniently sidestep the feelings of a slave having known that 'massah' and any other white male could sexually denigrate his wife, sister, mother, or preteen child at any time. It's almost like white males are supposed to be "entitled" to do whatever they felt and if someone who is impacted "reacts"- like Nat Turner- then that person is at fault. In real life Nat Turner may have killed white women and children in the rebellion but these same "so-called innocent" white people didn't have any heartburn over the inhumane brutality suffered ad nauseam by black women and children. Based on many reviews seems like the same savage primitive attitudes of many whites haven't changed in the past 185+ years since the events of this movie.