Green Goblin Reviews: Detroit
This is honestly a hard film to recommend to everyone. Not because it’s bad. Far from it. It is a fantastic motion picture. It’s a hard film to recommend because the story it’s telling is just…..just the worst. The fact that this event took place 50 years ago and still rings so true to society here and now in relation to police brutality, racial profiling, police shootings, juries still giving cops the benefit of the doubt and the overall corruption in our justice system just all culminates in a film that feels less about a harsher era in history and more about how western society has failed the African American community ever since they had to begrudgingly admit that we were human beings. So before my review, let me just put this out there for any of my black readers out there: If the premise of this film seems to hard for you to really sit comfortably through, I completely understand. A lot of this stuff still resonates every time we turn on the news. And despite being one of the best films I’ve seen this year, it is not a film that needs a second viewing. It sticks with you, ya know? Director Kathryn Bigelow has kind of made it her business to not pull punches with the likes of Zero Dark Thirty or the Hurt Locker. It hits more here when the subject is both in our past and still very much reflected in our present. With all of that in mind, here’s my take on Detroit
One (very minor) nitpick I have off the top of my head is that the name might give someone the impression that this film centers around the 1967 Detroit riots as a whole. It does not. Though they do inform you of the tinder being piled up and the initial spark that led to the riots proper, our story takes place in the middle of it. Centering the Algiers hotel, multiple black men (and two white women) settle in at the hotel to avoid the panic in the streets as the police and national guard have issued a city-wide curfew as they patrol the streets for snipers and looters. Through some unfortunate tomfoolery involving a toy gun, police and military in the area swarm in on the hotel, under the belief that there was a sniper firing shots on the second floor. The rest of the film centers around the police harassing, beating and killing individuals in the hotel as an attempt to shake a confession out of any of the remaining people. Jon Boyega does a phenomenal job as a night security guard named Melvin Dismukes who follows the shooting with the National Guard and tries his best to stay in the room and prevent things from getting too rough, but there’s only so much wiggle room a group of all white police officers and servicemen are willing to give a black rent-a-cop when it comes to stepping in. Dismukes knows this, and walks that line about a closely as any person reasonably could in his situation and every interaction he has, you can see he’s weighing on whether this may get him kicked out of the situation completely or even worse, put against the wall with the hotel guests just for speaking out of turn.
There’s a lot that I’m leaving to the imagination here, but believe me when I say that it is hard to sit through a lot of this. Will Poulter plays a psychotically racist cop who is mentally justifying his own actions either in his head or to others, while encouraging the other officers to proceed in terrorizing the hotel guests to tears. And the means they use to dehumanize them are about what you’d expect. “So you’re a military veteran? I don’t believe it. That military ID is probably forged. You know how much trouble that can get you into, boy?” “You ladies here of your own free will? You sure you’re not just being pimped out? How long have you been prostitutes, anyways?” It’s the kind of twisted tactics that make you just feel unclean, but in an age before everyone has a camera in their pockets, it becomes even more terrifying to know that if this officer were to kill you, their story is the only one that will be run in the newspaper. Hell, this predates Tennessee v Garner, and you do in fact see officers repeatedly fire at fleeing civilians.
This film (and films like it) are important. They’re films that need to exist. They’re not meant to placate or entertain you. They’re made to make you think; make you ask yourself what would you do in that same situation. What could you do in that situation? Once the epilogue was over and the credits start rolling, everyone in my audience was either on the verge of tears, emotionally drained or pissed off. The sentiments of the film linger with you after you leave the theater. Despite all of that, it is a film that I am happy exists and to have seen myself. Just hard to go from the fun July blockbuster season we’ve been having to……this.
9/10 Like I said. This is a fantastic film. And I will without a doubt be adding it to my own collection. But I honestly couldn’t tell you if I’d ever want to watch it again anytime soon.