A well done but unpleasant movie I would not recommend

Rating: 6/10 (25 November 2013)

I thought this movie would be miserable to watch and it was. It was well done and if you want to see a simplistic movie showing slavery at its worst this is your movie. The setting were beautiful and the actors were well cast. However there was not much new about the story short of his being made a slave and his inability to escape. The slaves seemed to have no lives of their own or concerns of their own short of reacting to the master, and to have a stronger sense of themselves and their misery than anyone told all their live they were chattel, would have. The most scary and discouraging thing I ever heard on the subject was a former slave saying she had 11 kids and the master must have been really glad of her. This was missing from the movie. It is based on a book meant to be propaganda for the abolitionists and while true is probably an amalgamation of unpleasant stories the author knew of combined with some he experienced. The real story of slavery is one of good and bad men caught in a horrible system and it is complicated. But if you like horror movies with blood and two hours of gut wrenching evil and this for you.