This is Kathryn Bigelow's third film based on true events, the first two being Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. She is very good at making films about the history of war and social change. Her films are often interspersed with many characters, rather than focusing on one or two people, and they are often long. This one is no exception, but compared to the first two, I found this one to be more gripping and cut down on some unnecessary details.
At the beginning of the film, I really thought it was an advertisement or a promotional film when I first saw it, and the paper-style animation really didn't fit well. I guess the director did not add this title at the beginning, and then during the test screening, many people said that they could not understand or were difficult to understand, so in the post-production rush, they might use this animation method to explain the background of the film. The Detroit film does require a sufficient understanding of the historical background at the time to understand it. If you don’t know much about the 1967 Detroit riots and the suburbanization of American urban populations, I think you can search for some historical background information before watching the film. It helps to appreciate the film better.
Apart from the animation at the beginning, I think one of the advantages of this film is that it directly brings the audience into the riot, without too much nonsense, making people feel like they are in the scene. At the beginning of the film, a group of black men entertaining black soldiers returning from the Vietnam War in an "illegal bar" (forgot the name) is a good microcosm of Detroit at the time. Black people in the city couldn't go to white bars, so they had to organize their own bar activities, and they were brought back by the police in the process of welcoming the black soldiers of the Vietnam War. I can imagine how angry they were. This also triggered all kinds of beatings, smashings and looting in the future, giving people a feeling of doomsday, and also paved the way for the subsequent hotel scenes. Here I have to mention a scene that made me very unforgettable at the beginning. The soldiers in the tanks thought they were attacked by snipers and blasted their barrels there. I won't go into the specific details. If you watch it, you will definitely feel angry and sad. have no choice. I don't think it's appropriate to put the blame entirely on one party. In the social context at the time, tragedy was a two-way street. Of course, the black community was much more traumatized. Listen to each other and the problem will only get worse.
Algiers motel, that is, the motel scene takes up almost half of the film and is also the core of the film. Director Bigelow, as always, uses a handheld camera to shoot, giving people an immersive feeling like watching a real documentary, but if you are dizzy in 3D for a long time, you may feel a little dizzy. To put it simply, there are many characters in the hotel scene, three Detroit police officers, a black security guard and a group of blacks and two white women. In a group scene, the director does not particularly highlight a certain role, and all the actors are regarded as one part of the historical background. Molecule, even a big-name actor like Anthony Mackie makes you feel like he's no different. The whole process is terrifying, and every shot makes your heart tremble and makes your palms sweat. If the skin color and race are ignored, this movie can finish most horror thrillers, especially in the process of the two black brothers in the band trying to escape, there is a scene where they just went out the door and faced an American army in the distance. The soldiers, who were blind, quickly turned their heads and hid back, which reminded people of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", and it was also full of irony. The good people who tried to escape met the police like a mouse meets a cat. Detroit cops are bad and racist, but I feel more of an inner excess of vanity and arrogance, or cowardice. There is a scene when an American army passed the hotel and learned what happened inside. The head of the army said "They also have civil rights" (this is roughly what it means, I can't remember the exact words). Just when you thought a member of this righteous state machine was going to pull a knife to help, he said, "Our military's judicial system is not the same as their Detroit police system, so don't mess with it" and walked away. You will feel a deep atmosphere and helplessness, as you usually see a lot of such news, a certain person does not dare to lift the person who fell to the ground, because he is afraid that the legal issues in the future will not be able to get due protection. A brave hero who dares to help those in distress recklessly, we admire him, and most of them exist in various marvel and DC worlds; but for us mortals, the imperfection of the system does not allow us to turn back. To do what we want to do and should do. From these details, it can be seen that the director conveyed to the audience not just a few police officers with serious racist thoughts, but the bureaucracy and the complicated and unsound system under the social background at that time.
The final scene is the court trial and the aftermath of the incident, where the "bad cop" is unfortunately acquitted. I didn't feel too much surprise and atmosphere, because when you look at the almost all-white jury and the historical context of the entire film, you'd expect this outcome. The end of the film tells us that some of the details of the film are inferred from various court filings, so not all the shots are real. We can almost be certain that those police officers are serious racists, but we don't have to convict them for that. I'm not whitewashing anyone, but if you're just seeing a couple of cops who didn't get the punishment they deserved and resenting it, you're not getting the gist of the film. If things were just that simple, race issues wouldn't have plagued America until now.
To add some details about the movie, I watched it at the alamo draft house. There are some black people and some white people. In fact, the audience did not always feel depressed and indignant during the whole film screening process, and there were some laughter from time to time. There are indeed some comparisons in the film. Witty shots and dialogue. For example, at the beginning, the black man who danced while grilling sausages attracted a lot of laughter from the black audience, and later during the trial, the surviving black band boy said, "I have a head, attached to my body, You can twist to the left and you can twist to the right." I can hear a lot of laughter, but here I think it's more of a nod to the black brother's mockery of the white lawyer.
Write so much first, then think about it and add it later.
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