12 Years a Slave

Django who?

                                 Solomon couldn't wait to blow out the candles on his birthday cake

DIRECTOR: Steve McQueen

CAST: Kinky Boots, sex addict, another name I have difficulty saying, Smaug, Rusty Ryan, the crazy bible basher from There Will Be Blood, The Rhino, Ellen Dolan and yet another name that I can't pronounce...

PLOT: Based on the true story of Solomon Northup, 12 Years a Slave tells the tale of a free black man living in 19th century New York who is kidnapped and sold into slavery.


Some filmmakers are often targeted for making films simply in an attempt to win awards. They have an emotional script that will strike a chord with panels and empathic audiences alike. They don't work on a massive budget, but they still manage to attract a lot of pristine and usually-expensive actors to star in the film. At the very least they'll receive a nomination, and from then on in all of their trailers they will be able to have the cool voiceover guy say "Directed by Academy Award nominated..."

12 Years a Slave is not that film.

And throwing it out there early on; to the many who simply brush this film aside as 'white guilt' (which doesn't make sense as it was directed by a black man): less of the ignorance and stupidity, please. If that sort of thinking was to be related to cinema, it would suggest that no filmmaker can tell a non-fictionionalised story of an important moment or event in history.

To think like this would be to discredit Spielberg's Schindler's List, Greengrass' United 93, even Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. Discredit every great war film ever made, for that matter, as it is this mindset that stems from schoolboy thinking - taking a huge, steaming dump on anyone who shows the slightest bit of passion about a subject.

Either that or you're simply a contrarian.

Away from the rant, though, 12 Years a Slave is a work of art across all aspects of cinema, and because of this, the horrifying story of Solomon Northup, and the atrocities that he faced that are reconstructed in unflinching scenes of pain and anguish, makes 12 Years a Slave worth watching. Many will struggle to stomach scenes that depict torture, such as whippings and hangings, but the beautiful cinematography from Sean Bobbitt, the stunning score from Hans Zimmer and the assured directing from Steve McQueen, maintaining a streak of truly fantastic films, pulls you in from the very beginning of the film and refuses to let you go, making sure that you fully immerse yourself in the emotional rollercoaster that plays like the anti Django Unchained.

                     "Instead of spending all your money on guns, maybe you should buy some tic tacs"

As well as the film having to defend itself against accusations of 'white guilt', McQueen has also had to defend the amount of violence and horror that is shown; the camera hardly veering away from the brutality. To have not made 12 Years a Slave as they had would have been trivialising the entire era of slavery in the US. Justice wouldn't have been fully done and it would have been insulting to people that identify themselves or have strong feelings towards the topic.

Which brings in the acting; which may very well dominate all of the plaudits, making it easy to forget every other aspect of the film. McQueen has often favoured the slow-paced, minimalist approach to many scenes in his three feature films to date, and this gives the talent the opportunity to show off their chops. When the performances have to take on all of the cruel doings and context - hurting each other and being racist to the point where the film is so convincing it becomes terrifying, you know the entire ensemble has, reluctantly in some cases, grasped the subject matter and the story with both hands and done justice to the epic biopic.

It would be unfair to pick out any one performance and hail it as the best, despite the fact that Chiwetel Ejiofor and Michael Fassbender have both, perhaps deservedly so, been winning over the critics. Ejiofor, a fine actor who will rightfully finally be given his fair share of roles in bigger, better films now, is graceful, determined and heartbreaking as Solomon Northup. Fassbender, a McQueen favourite, turns in another performance that highlights his shout as the best actor in the world right now as an evil slaver who tries his very best to make Northup's life a living hell.

But overall, each and every performance, including Paul Dano, Brad Pitt and newcomer Lupita Nyong'o, perfectly rounds this off to be a fully realised and satisfying masterpiece of cinema that goes to show the importance of film as an art form and how stunning a story can be when everything falls precisely into place.

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