Review of Detroit (2017) by K Nife C — 08 Aug 2017

If you were looking for another reason to get outraged at the state of racial tensions in America, look no further than Kathryn Bigelow's latest historical drama Detroit. I for one am all out of umbrage after witnessing this year's vastly more poignant depiction of systemic inequality for African Americans during the Civil Rights movement in Raoul Peck's I Am Not Your Negro.

I'm also drained of claustrophobic anxiety after Chris Nolan's exhausting Dunkirk. In Detroit, we have a shaky-cam war reel of dramatized events that blur the line between historical reenactment and galvanizing torture porn.

With a narrative cobbled together from various memoirs and interviews, the film depicts the events surrounding the murder of three young black men at the Algiers Motel in 1967. The culprits, three white policemen, were *spoilers* never convicted of the murders due to a slick defense attorney (played by Jim from The Office) and technicalities of a broken legal system.

But the film rather matter-of-factly insists that they murdered those men with impunity. If we are to take the film at its word, those policemen are awful people and deserve all the bad press, and let's be honest, they did murder them.

But the issue of which cops killed who and with what degree of sadism are certainly embellished in the film. Bigelow changed those characters' names to skirt the issue of slander, but it begs the question: "What responsibility does a filmmaker have as a journalist?" This major motion picture will be a defining document of those tragic events, and though it is biased in favor of the victims, how much is truth and how much is it just what we want to remember? Aside from the greater issues raised by the film, it is intense but overextended and occasionally tiresome.

For all the work put into the minutiae of most of the characters' daily lives in Detroit, it vacillates between a character driven crime flick and a politically driven period drama, disregarding both at times for the sake of hackneyed suspense/thriller genre beats.

It also seems a tad exploitative in its depiction of the torture, but as Bigelow loves to point out unequivocally, war is hell.