This movie has not aged well
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Amistad
frankduxvandamme — 11 years ago(April 11, 2014 11:06 PM)
The music in the film is so cheesy in its attempts to be powerful and grandiose and there's also just too much of it in the movie. Also, all of John Quincy Adams's monologues are such generic hollywood schlock. Lastly, the movie talks about the evils of slavery, but it doesn't do a good job in actually illustrating the evils of slavery. The few scenes of slavery and captivity are fairly tame. Honestly, the whole thing feels like somebody made a movie out of The American Experience at Disney World.
12 Years A Slave is a vastly superior film on slavery. It is incredibly gritty and realistic, with very little cheesy music (and very little music period), and it doesn't hold back on the physical and emotional horrors of slavery. -
bond_98 — 11 years ago(April 18, 2014 10:50 PM)
I don't know how the movie could have illustrated the evils of slavery. Considering that the movie is more about a real life Court Trial that was one of the events that lead to the civil war. All the African on the Amistad were jailed. Not sent to a Plantation. And Frankly i think there where many shocking scene in the movie. The part were they drowned like 30 people off the side of the boat was horrific. Also its not like there haven't been other films before 12 years a slave that showed the horrors of Slavery. I haven't seen 12 years a slave yet. So i can't compare.
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jimmyr5595 — 11 years ago(April 20, 2014 11:22 AM)
I watched both 12YAS and Amistad recently for comparison, and I feel like they're completely different films. Both are now among my all time favorites, but I enjoy Amistad more. I feel like it's vastly underrated.
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emncaity — 11 years ago(June 18, 2014 11:46 AM)
I actually agree with you very much (see separate thread that I'm about to start up when I get time) on the overuse of score. I'm not so crazy about the rewriting of JQA's statement before the Supreme Court, either, or the rewriting of the Court's own decision. (JQA my great-great-etc. grandfather, as it so happens does get proper credit for being a careful but effective abolitionist, though.)
However, on what do you base your notion that Amistad somehow "held back on the physical and emotional horrors of slavery"? -
Bellatrice — 10 years ago(August 04, 2015 04:39 PM)
I agree with you wholeheartedly on the cheesiness of the music and the overwrought script. Leave it to Spielberg to take a momentously significant story (I also include Schindler's List which my father, a holocaust survivor, wrote off as Hollywood shlock) and turn it into a cartoon. The dialogue was so unbearable I had to mute the sound. The Solomon Northrop film was vastly superior, and even Tarantino's Django Unchained was far more respectful of the history than this piece of fluff. My advice to Spielberg - stick to dinosaurs, extraterrestrials and robots where you can wallow in all the special effects you want, and leave the real storytelling to those who are not afraid to let the material speak for itself.
Austerity is a word said mainly by people with a full stomach. -
AnthonySocksss — 3 years ago(October 03, 2022 02:06 AM)
What a ****ing idiot, 12 Years a Slave (to a boring movie) is ****ing garbage compared to this.
Melton1 Wanted for Pedophilia:
https://i.ibb.co/6cnPmJVr/IMG-0830.jpg
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/Zjxk307CND0 -
headstar — 3 years ago(January 05, 2023 07:45 AM)
All slave films are rather unrealistic and are made to fit an agenda. These films always leave out the fact that African male slaves were also being sexually assaulted by the slave traders and owners. This homosexual rape was called "buck breaking". It's not uncommon to see ads in early American newspapers by men looking to purchase only boys and young men. Male slaves over 25 years old would be cheaper as they were considered less "desirable".
The films also hide the major Jewish involvement in the slave business. As the early American-Jews and crypto-Jewish settlers made their money off slave trading, distilling the Rum (used to trade for slaves in Africa) cash-crops, insuring the slave ships, lending money to plantations, bankrolling the trips to Africa, etc -
Melton1 — 6 days ago(March 25, 2026 08:04 AM)
I don’t think it’s a matter of not ageing well, it’s just a flawed film.
The good bits are brilliant - the treatment of the salves on the ship is seared into my brain, it’s some of Spielberg’s darkest material and opened my eyes to the full horror of the practice. I haven’t seen a slavery film that has matched the power of that sequence.
But, Spielberg’s childish sentimentalism spoils much of the rest of the film. The constant trumpets over JQA’s speeches were horribly overcooked, like Spielberg is saying ‘This. Is. Important. Historical. Grandeur. Wow. Pay. Attention!’ The dialogue, performances and direction made the characters often seem like caricatures - with pro slavery figures sneering pompous baddies
It felt patronisingly didactic and I kept thinking how a much more detached Scorsese-like approach would have been more effective. Assume the audience is intelligent and just present things realistically and trust that we’ll get it.
The film is still worth watching on balance but you’ll need a couple of pills for the nausea.
