I want to start by saying that Harriet Tubman is probably the closest person to a role-model that I have. So when they dropped the trailer for the movie I had already decided that I was going to see it. Fast-forward a couple of months and adult life was getting in the way of planning a simple trip to the movie with friends, and I’m on my way to watch Harriet.
In the time between the release and watching the movie, I heard a lot of mixed reviews. Some were praising the film for its depiction of Harriet Tubman and a real-life superhero. Other people were calling out the movie for being inaccurate. So, when I went to see the movie, I wasn’t really sure what to expect.
Before I get into the movie review, let me say that a lot of the people who gave negative reviews hadn’t seen Harriet yet or never planned to see it. In the black community, there is a notion that we don’t need any more stories about slavery. People who say this will always push back against any media with that narrative. So as far as I see it, most of the negative reviews were those people decided to hate the movie before it even came out.
When people say that Harriet Tubman was a real-life superhero, they aren’t wrong. This movie is her origin story. Harriet focuses more on the things in her life that lead to her becoming Moses. Her time as a conductor of the Underground Railroad was mainly shown in a montage. This movie reminded me of Captain America: The First Avenger in that regard.
If you don’t know a lot about Harriet Tubman, it would be jarring to see how religious she was. The movie kind of treats the fact that Tubman believed she could speak to God as if it wasn’t that weird. Though these premonitions contribute to the superhero feel of her story. To clarify, Tubman suffered a head injury as a child with gave her the fainting spells that she says the Lord spoke to her through. The movie does eventually get around to explaining this to the audience, but I wish they did it sooner.
One thing that I didn’t like about the movie is that it gives the impression that Tubman went it alone. While they did show Underground Railroad with people like William Still contributing to Tubman’s fight, but Tubman does all the heavy lifting in this story, which is fair. After all, the movie is called Harriet. I suspect that this was an attempt to avoid the white savior trope. You can’t have someone steal the spotlight if they’re never on screen.
Anything else I could say about the movie would slip into spoiler territory, so I’ll wrap this up by simply saying that this was a great movie. The story was good. The direction was good. There were a couple of things I would have liked to see done differently, but it was still good enough that I wouldn’t mind a second watch.
I Think Thinks 