Film: Detroit

If only Detroit were a horror film, we could go back to being happy and breathing normally afterwards.

July 1967, while the rest of America was enjoying the only real Summer of Love, riots erupted in Detroit, the centre of America’s car industry, Motown, and techno. Or was it a rebellion? In any case, it came to blows between the baited black population and the police. The national guard was called in. Five days later, 43 people were dead, 1.189 wounded, and 7.200 imprisoned.

The film Detroit offers an impressive reconstruction of the beginning of the 1967 Detroit Riot or 1967 Detroit Rebellion and then focuses on the horrific events at the Algiers Hotel. The Detroit police, Michigan state police, and American army stormed the motel looking for a suspected sniper. They couldn’t find him. They didn’t even find a gun. So the frenzied, inexperienced, and racist officers decided to terrorize and torture the motel’s guests instead: two white girls and ten young black men. Three of them were murdered.

Director Kathryn Bigelow asked Mark Boal to conduct meticulous research for the film and write the script. Boal is a journalist and screenwriter who previously provided Bigelow with the facts and scripts for Zero Dark Thirty, about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, and The Hurt Locker, the multiple Oscar-winning portrait of a bomb expert. Bigelow knows exactly how to build tension, how to film action, and how to edit a film with compelling rhythm.

That’s exactly what she has been doing for the past thirty years. She not only manages to make the audience feel as though they were there during those dark hours in Detroit, things get so constricting and increasingly horrific that you have to force yourself not to look, or even run, away. After the devastating climax, the film falls flat, and some people will lament the absence of any forceful political analysis. Although it is crystal clear that racism, police violence, and structural racism are demons that tormented America fifty years ago and still do today.

> Detroit. US, dir.: Kathryn Bigelow, act.: John Boyega, Will Poulter, Anthony Mackie, Algee Smith