12 Years A Slave

Rating: 9/10 (3 January 2016)

12 Years a Slave details the life of Solomon Northup, a free black man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery. Chiwetel Ejiofor portrays Solomon Northup very well, capturing the classy man before slavery as well as the man that was put into slavery. The horrors of slavery were shown to be life-changing, turning Northup into a completely different man than he was before his kidnapping. He was forced to witness many atrocities in his 12 years as a slave. One such atrocity was from Master Epps and his treatment of his slave Patsey. I won't go into details, but these sorts of atrocities very clearly affected Solomon. Master Epps was a horrifying character in the way he acted towards his slaves, and Michael Fassbender did an excellent job portraying him. One problem that I had with this movie was its portrayal of race. Although it is a movie about slavery, that doesn't mean that every white person (except for Brad Pitt of course) has to be so evil, and likewise, not every black person is as nice. Despite this I thought that 12 Years a Slave was a very good movie, and I would give it a 9 out of 10.