An excellent, tragic & powerful movie.

Rating: 9/10 (29 April 2014)

12 Years a Slave is another example of a movie that starkly shows the brutality of slavery as seen through the eyes of the person that lived to tell the tale.
I had never read the book that the movie is based on and with any movie that uses a book as it's source you have to go in with the foresight that not everything is going to be factual. Even if the movie was exactly as per the book, the story is still only going to be one sided as there can be no differing opinion to the same circumstance.
In any case, even if the story was only half true, it still makes for powerful viewing.
Free man Solomon Northup is a educated man living in Saratoga New York with his wife and 2 children. A chance meeting with 2 white traveling entertainers, has them convincing Solomon to travel to Washington with them as he can play the violin. During dinner, Solomon is drugged and when he awakes he finds himself in a cell in chains. So begins his descent into a nightmare of slavery.
It turns out that his 2 white "friends" were nothing more than con-men who drug black Americans and sell them into slavery. His name is suddenly no longer Solomon and instead he gets renamed "Platt" and is regarded as nothing more than a recaptured runaway slave.
The film is regarded by some as nothing more than a film that glorifies torture and sadism through exceptional and extreme methods of punishment, however this is an excellent portrayal of what innocent people went through on a daily basis for over a hundred years for no other reason than a difference in skin colour. If you were black you had no rights and were traded as cattle or property. Family's were often forcibly separated, with mothers having their children torn away from them never to be seen again.
While the violence and tones of despair throughout the movie are quite often very hard to take, it has been lauded as one of the most accurate accounts of what slavery for many was really like at that time. Even if you were free, you still needed papers to prove it and compared to the whites at the time you almost had no rights at all.
Too many reviews have cast this movie down for incidents and actions taken by Solomon as not making any sense. The questions posed by many such as "why didn't he do this or that or the other", are stupid when watching a movie and therefore being completely separated from whatever situation they are watching. Slavery was more than just oppression, there were ill fated consequences for any slave that was found to be educated, literate or was considered as a flight risk. Case in point, when Patsey, played by Lupita Nyong'o is brutally whipped, almost to death as the master believed she had run off. Constant fear can make a person do strange things and when seen in retrospect, a lot of what Solomon did throughout the movie makes quite a lot of sense.
The film has many tense and shocking moments and regardless of whether or not you believe the story to be factual, you'd have to be a robot to not run through a gamete of emotions while watching this film, particularly when he is reunited with his family after enduring so much. The film is not a documentary and it never claims to be, yet numerous scholars have researched the book and regard it as a true account of Solomon Northup's experience, despite it being largely ghost-written by a white person.
12 years a slave is a must see movie with outstanding performances done by pretty much everybody that's in it.