Let me explain my stance on this film:

Rating: 7/10 (2 May 2014)

I'm just going to get down to my point: Twelve Years A Slave is a good film. It may be an even better film to people who know less about slavery, however, to me it is just "A little better than good".
Twelve Years A Slave tries really hard to make the audience uncomfortable by showing the truths of slavery and the cruel world slaves lived in during the middle of the 19th century... and it succeeds at it. The movie doesn't hide how messed up some of the slave masters were and how delusional others were. I have read a bit of the book along with the autobiography of Frederick Douglass and several other slaves. The movie does interpret these events very well.
However, this is where the movie's fault comes in: The movie isn't much more than a slave statement. Slavery is bad. Here is a man who changed and went through much suffering. While I condemn racism and I'm glad this movie shows the wrongs of the past, the movie doesn't do anything more than show a whole bunch of wrong doings. The movie is just: bad event, bad event, bad event, bad event--coincidentally similar to Gravity in a sense. The movie doesn't stand up and prove anything that the audience (maybe it's just me) didn't know. We have seen slavery movies in the past and we have read the autobiographies. The movie forgets to be something more than an anti-slavery statement. Slavery has already been gone in America for over 150 years, so the movie needed something more to its message other than "slavery is bad".
Granted, racism is still an issue today, which is why this movie still holds importance. Still, the movie doesn't try to do anything other than inform of the evils of the past. The movie is literally a series of horrible things and that is it. As soon as the evils end, the movie ends. In my opinion, the movie needed to flesh out its purpose a little more.
On a side-note: This movie has one of the most generic soundtracks I have ever heard, and it is even down-right bad at times. Not even joking, you will hear the same chords played exactly the same for the entire movie.
A good movie, but it doesn't bring anything new to the table regarding the issues of America's past.