The Upcoming
  • Cinema & Tv
    • Movie reviews
    • Film festivals
      • Berlin
      • Tribeca
      • Sundance London
      • Cannes
      • Locarno
      • Venice
      • London
      • Toronto
    • Show reviews
  • Music
    • Live music
  • Food & Drinks
    • News & Features
    • Restaurant & bar reviews
    • Interviews & Recipes
  • Theatre
  • Art
  • Travel & Lifestyle
  • Literature
  • Fashion & Beauty
    • Accessories
    • Beauty
    • News & Features
    • Shopping & Trends
    • Tips & How-tos
    • Fashion weeks
      • London Fashion Week
      • London Fashion Week Men’s
      • New York Fashion Week
      • Milan Fashion Week
      • Paris Fashion Week
      • Haute Couture
  • Join us
    • Editorial unit
    • Our writers
    • Join the team
    • Join the mailing list
    • Support us
    • Contact us
  • Competitions
  • Facebook

  • Twitter

  • Instagram

  • YouTube

  • RSS

CultureMovie reviews

The Birth of a Nation

The Birth of a Nation | Movie review
8 December 2016
Sam Gray
Avatar
Sam Gray
8 December 2016

Movie and show review

Sam Gray

The Birth of a Nation

★★★★★

Release date

9th December 2016

Certificate

UPG121518 title=

Links

TwitterInstagramFacebookWebsite

Here’s a story that dates back over 50 years. Not slavery, or the violent revolution of Nat Turner, but the Hollywood vanity project. This is where a major star, like Kevin Spacey or John Travolta, decide to push all their famous weight into making a “personal” project, that is constructed around improving their own image – which, to everyone outside their personal bubble, seems absurd. How else to explain Beyond the Sea or Battlefield Earth? And yet, just because a film is born out of vanity – from an industry where vanity is basically currency – doesn’t mean it will bad. After all, few call Orson Welles’s debut a vanity project, in spite of the fact that it was written, directed by and starring Welles, and was used to launch his career into the stratosphere. Because Citizen Kane was very good.

Birth of a Nation is not very good, but it is not very bad, either. It is a vanity project – distorted by Nate Parker’s fluctuating public image – which does attempt to tackle a timely issue, with bold, if adversely blunt, force.

Re-appropriating its title from DW Griffith’s 1915 epic – whose technical merits are mitigated by its unforgivable racism – the film follows Nat Turner (Parker) who, in 1831, instigated a slave uprising across plantations in the south. They managed to kill 57 whites until they were caught, and led to the deaths of 200 slaves – not to mention legislative measures against slavery, many fearful of an encore. Turner’s journey towards violence is illustrated in full. As a child, he is told that he has been chosen by God; he learns to read, becomes a preacher, and his owner Samuel (Armie Hammer) is paid to rent out his word of God to other plantations.

Shock tactics are used to depict the violence endured by slaves – a gory scene involving teeth is hard to endure – that marks Parker’s general reluctance to flinch. Though there is an unfortunately cheap quality to much of the scenes outside of (overwhelmingly male) domestic drama; the climax, in particular, borders on silly. It also skims over the controversies in Turner’s actions, the kind Martin Luther King would have condemned. For many, it was a stupid plan that got innocent people killed.

Much as Mel Gibson made Braveheart, Nate Parker has made Slaveheart – more noble in intention, perhaps, but still flawed.

★★★★★

Sam Gray

The Birth of a Nation is released nationwide on 9th December 2016.

Watch the trailer for The Birth of a Nation here:

Related Itemsnat turnerreviewthe bith of a nation

More in Movie reviews

Emergency

★★★★★
Umar Ali
Read More

The Road Dance

★★★★★
Matthew McMillan
Read More

Rhino

★★★★★
Catherine Sedgwick
Read More

The Innocents

★★★★★
Emma Kiely
Read More

Benediction

★★★★★
Lauren Devine
Read More

This Much I Know to Be True

★★★★★
Andrew Murray
Read More

The Quiet Girl (An Cailín Ciúin)

★★★★★
Andrew Murray
Read More

Vortex

★★★★★
Joseph Owen
Read More

Everything Everywhere All at Once

★★★★★
Guy Lambert
Read More
Scroll for more
Tap

Movie and show review

Sam Gray

The Birth of a Nation

★★★★★

Release date

9th December 2016

Certificate

UPG121518 title=

Links

TwitterInstagramFacebookWebsite

  • Popular

  • Latest

  • TOP PICKS

  • My Fair Lady at the London Coliseum
    ★★★★★
    Theatre
  • The Father and the Assassin at the National Theatre
    ★★★★★
    Theatre
  • Plan 75
    ★★★★★
    Cannes
  • More than Ever (Plus que Jamais)
    ★★★★★
    Cannes
  • Feminine Power: The Divine to the Demonic at the British Museum
    ★★★★★
    Art
  • Roma Bar Show returns for a second edition in Rome next week
    Food & Drinks
  • “I wanted to sabotage it”: An interview with Mark Jenkin on Enys Men
    Cannes
  • The Innocent (L’Innocent)
    ★★★★★
    Cannes
  • Domingo and the Mist (Domingo y la Niebla)
    ★★★★★
    Cannes
  • Metronom
    ★★★★★
    Cannes
  • The Innocent (L’Innocent)
    ★★★★★
    Cannes
  • Metronom
    ★★★★★
    Cannes
  • Moonage Daydream
    ★★★★★
    Cannes
  • Crimes of the Future
    ★★★★★
    Cannes
  • Decision to Leave (Heojil Kyolshim)
    ★★★★★
    Cannes
The Upcoming
Pages
  • Contact us
  • Join mailing list
  • Join us
  • Our London food map
  • Our writers
  • Support us
  • What, when, why
With the support from:
International driving license

Copyright © 2011-2020 FL Media

Lissie at Koko | Live review
Clean Bandit at Camden Assembly | Live review