Now, it is seen as an awards front-runner. But I do remember this time last year that Lincoln was the heavy favorite, and it slowly faded away.
I'm not sure about this one. Director Steve McQueen has made a great telling of a true story that is not that well known. The tale of Solomon Northup is made for being a movie, and it is going to be a successful one.
The big positives to come out of this, is the amazing landscape of the plantations Northup visits, which were brilliantly presented by cinematographer Sean Bobbitt.
There is a lot of great performances, and the highlights are Michael Fassbender, Lupita N'Yongo and Chiwetel Ejiofor. I am a big fan of Fassbender and I think he is probably my favorite actor at the moment alongside Tom Hanks. But as soon as he arrives on screen, you know he is bad news. As his character becomes borderline psychotic, you just become more amazed at his performance. This is the same for N'Yongo, as for some she has come out of nowhere to suddenly be a front-runner for best supporting actress. When she arrives on screen, there is not much too shout about. But as the movie gets towards the finale, N'Yongo is glowing and his riding the wive of her own performance.
For leading actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, it looks like that was a tough role. With the amount of pressure he probably had on him to make this film a success, I think he held it together to make the film and his performance worthy enough to get award nominations.
There were some other great performances from Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano and Brad Pitt. But despite their short amount of time on screen, their contribution was enough to win me over and it made the viewing more and more pleasant.
One award category that I am confident they will secure is best adapted screenplay. It is high-quality story-telling. A lot of scenes really gets you into this incredible story, especially some of the un-pleasant parts. I am sure it will make the widely unknown book become a belated best-seller.
Only a couple of parts of film that I did not like as much. The biggest one was the pacing in the second half. At the start, I was happy with it and it got me hooked as to where Solomon was going next. But it seemed everything slowed down and I was getting slightly annoyed. Thankfully the ending was nicely uplifting, but the stuff before that reminded me of the pacing of The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford. It's not necessarily a bad thing to have a movie that is slowly moving along, but the content involved in the slow bits did not amaze me enough to keep me saying "this is great".
Also, when I heard that Hans Zimmer was going to do the music, I was keen to hear what he composed. It started well but was non-existent for the rest. But with this film not really suiting to his normal style, it was probably a good thing to not have too much of it. It is probably just me wanting more as I love Zimmer and movie soundtracks in general.
Despite those two small negatives, I really enjoyed it and I can see why it ticks all the boxes for potentially winning a lot of the major awards. Any bad things I say about this film is not because I am nit-picking due to its success in the awards, it is just my opinion. It was really good, but I did not feel it was as good as the awards are making it. I still think people should go and see it, as there is a lot to like.
Rating: 8/10
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