Kathryn Bigelow's Detroit Is A Missed Opportunity
Her movie, about the 1967 race riots, lacks nuance, with characters that never come alive. There are no deeper truths here.
Detroit is a film about war. So were the previous two collaborations between director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. Like its predecessors, Detroit is concerned with the awesome ways in which state power is wielded by and against individuals. This time, though, the battle is not over the Arab world but an American city.
The film is based on real events—the racial unrest (you can call it a riot; the filmmakers call it a rebellion in an introductory note) that took place 50 years ago, in July of 1967. It began with a police raid on an unlicensed, after-hours bar on
