First attempt, but how many are to follow?

Rating: Null/10 (25 October 2001)

Glory could have been a great movie, but with Edward Zwick as director, it would have been too much to ask for the same guts in battling stereotypes as the soldiers of the 54th put up in trying to conquer Fort Wagner. As a Black man (well mixed-race actually), I had the following observations about Glory.
I very much dislike the term "freed slave", for the following two reasons:
a) There is no such thing as a "freed slave". A man is either free, and he isn't a slave, or he is a slave, and he isn't free. It's an oxymoron, and I prefer the term "ex-slave", which is at least has the benefit of being accurate.
b) It puts white folks in the driver's seat as actors of freeing "these people" who miraculously have found themselves to be slaves, somehow. On the contrary, many Africans in America freed themselves; they ran away, to the extent that not a week went by without southern newspapers running ads for runaway slaves; they bought their own freedom or had parents who did; they were or had parents who had been granted their freedom in through their owners' wills; they already lived as free men, whether in Canada, the north or even south.
It panders to the Margaret Mitchell view of slavery, where all slaves were picking cotton on large plantations and were just going along with the system until the had freedom declared upon them. Many were engineers, builders, horsemen, domestics, etc. who in fact build and conserved much of the south.
However, it most poignantly doesn't break with the Hollywood cliche of a white man coming in and teaching black people how to stand up for themselves (yeah, right!). It is the same as Mario van Peebles found in his attempt to get funding for "Panthers" (can't we get a white guy to teach the Black Panthers how to shoot and defend themselves?).
In the end, the director didn't, as always happens, trust the audience to look at this as a great story and just "get it", without having to be helped along, or having artificial characters inserted to look down on or identify with, and that's this movie's tragedy. Morgan Freeman is great as usual, but his telling Denzel Washington to cool his heels too easily makes him look like an Uncle Tom. Denzel, on the other hand, is too easily cast as the Irrational Negro (like sometimes Miguel Nunez in Tour Of Duty), and the scene where he is whipped and a big, rolling tear runs down his face if _over the top_. The most offensive character is Jimhi Kennedy's bumpkin soldier.
Personally, I couldn't wait for the preliminaries to be over and get to the combat scenes, which are the savior of this movie. Usually, army units only have one movie dedicated to them (the British Paras had "A Bridge Too Far", the US Army's Mobile Picture Unit had "84 Charlie Mopic", etc.). It would be a shame if this was the only movie about the brave 54th Massachusetts Infantry.