Important social issues, but film gave me headache and motion sickness

Rating: 3/10 (7 August 2017)

"Detroit" (2017 release; 143 min.) brings the story of the Detroit riots. As the movie opens, we get a 2 min. animated intro as to how events starting with the Great Migration around WWI eventually led to "today", which the movie reminds us is "July 23, 1967". When the movie gets going, an unlicensed club is raided by the Detroit Police, and it's not long before the mostly white cops beat up the mostly black patrons of the club, Things get out of hand pretty fast after that, and before we know it, the city is ablaze, the National Guards are called in, and a state of emergency is declared...
Couple of comments: this is the latest film from critically acclaimed director Kathryn Bigelow. I adore her most recent work (The Hurt Locker; Zero Dark Thirty), and hence had high hopes for this movie. Here, working from a scrip by frequent collaborator Mark Boal, Bigelow intends to bring us what happened during the riots in Detroit exactly 50 years ago. For sure there were a lot of things that went wrong, on both sides, and hence these are important social issues that merit, indeed need, attention and discussion. It is then all the more regrettable that Bigelow chose to make the film the way she did. Almost from the get-go what we see and experience on the big screen is an incessant use of hand-held cameras (and shake them a bit for good measure). That, in combination with the all too frequent extreme close-ups, make for almost impossible viewing over an extended period of time. Let me just admit it right here and now: I made it through half the movie (70 min.). Realizing that yet another 75 min. was to come, and that I had a headache induced by watching the film, as well as possible motion sickness, I simply could not carry on and bailed. When it becomes that painful to simply watch a movie, there is a problem. And I was not alone. A woman 2 seats from me also bailed, and only after half an hour...
"Detroit" expanded nationally this weekend. I went to see it with a couple on Sunday late afternoon here in Cincinnati. Even though the couple stayed, afterwards I got a text from the guy saying "my wife essentially got sick", but he felt it was a "great, great, great and important movie." I responded back that I was glad he liked it. He in turn replied "I appreciated and respected it... 'liked' would be impossible". Case closed.