andievegas This film makes a mass murderer look like a saint. It is a revisionist look at a man that did butcher children. I don't blame the real life man for revolting but come-on they make him seem like a saint. Then again the man behind camera acts like in real life is a man of questionable integrity!Nat Turner the real life rebellion leader is revered by many to this day. I will never be one of them! In fact I will never see a film that Nate Parker is in. His butchering of history is a crime

makedahsari No sir. Lets do this better next time. , if we need a next time. Go for Touusannt Louveture next time. that would be a good movie. I admire Nate Parkers effort to bring forth a piece from history that would show that black culture didn't just sit back and accept their circumstance but fought for freedom, but he chose the wrong direction. The movie was supposed to be about the actual rebellion, and it should have gone straight to the battle. It took tooo long to get there and when you get there , the battle lasted all of 5 minutes in a defeat that ended with a black man hanging from a tree and whites clapping in the background. ummmm no. people pleasing ending, psychological warfare and the emasculating of black men in film and theatre is getting really tired.

sddavis63 Aside from the Nat Turner rebellion, most slave revolts in America have been largely forgotten - in spite of the fact that the largest slave revolt in US history took place in Louisiana 20 years BEFORE the Turner rebellion. "The Birth Of A Nation" offers us director, writer and star Nate Parker's perspective on the Turner rebellion. The movie receives a lot of negative comments which are probably based primarily on Parker's own controversial past. (He was accused of sexual assault while this movie was in production.) It's also possible that there's a segment of whites who have difficulty confronting the subject matter. I found this an engrossing movie that built well to its climax and in the end was moving and inspirational. The movie isn't without it's flaws but it provides a sobering perspective on slavery in the American south.That in itself, mind you, might be the movie's biggest flaw. The sobering perspective it provides is just another sobering perspective. It doesn't really offer anything fresh about the treatment of slaves in the south, simply reminding us that slavery was a brutal institution that dehumanized an entire race of people. There are some historical issues with the movie. First is the scene depicting the brutal rape of Turner's wife Cherry - which seems to have been invented by Parker for the film and becomes what you might call "the last straw" leading Turner into rebellion. But there's no evidence that it ever happened. I also thought that Parker softened the blow of the rebellion itself, perhaps to make Turner seem more noble? It was a bloody revolt that deliberately targeted white women and children and not just the men who owned the plantations and the slaves - but we didn't see much of the slaughter of the women and children. Turner's capture toward the end of the movie held Turner up as a model rather than offering the truth. In the movie Turner seems to hold his head high as he gives himself up. The truth is that he hid in the woods for a couple of months until he was discovered hiding in a hole in the ground by a white farmer. Parker clearly had an agenda here - to turn Turner into more of a hero than he was. The film also doesn't offer much analysis of the impact of the revolt. Was it successful? It's hard to say how to measure the success of such a revolt. No slaves were freed by it, and in the immediate aftermath of the revolt literally hundreds of blacks - slave and free - were murdered, and many laws were enacted that oppressed blacks even more than they already were. Little of that gets mentioned at any length. So the movie has its issues. However, I personally thought that the movie overcame those problems. In the basic flow of the story, the history was accurate enough, although the movie chose to have Turner remain the property of Samuel Turner up until the rebellion, whereas he had actually bounced around a fair bit. Perhaps that decision was made so that Samuel would be a sort of composite character representing all slave owners - but it creates a historical problem when Nat kills Samuel at the beginning of the rebellion since Samuel had died several years before the revolt. Turner was a preacher - taught to read and familiar with the Bible - and he definitely believed himself to be called by God for a greater purpose. That is a recurring theme in the movie: that Turner believed himself to be God's instrument, and the ultimate revolt to be God's vengeance against the white oppressors. In that, it points out that religion can be used to promote violence and killing as well as love and peace. I suppose it also raises the question of whether such violence and killing is sometimes justified - which are actually very relevant questions in today's world, where religious-inspired violence is becoming commonplace. In the movie, Turner helps an indebted Samuel save his plantation by being rented out to other whites to preach submission to their slaves, carefully selecting only "approved" verses from the Bible to justify slavery but is shown to become increasingly uncomfortable as he becomes more aware of Bible verses that condemn slavery and seem to justify violent rebellion against oppression.The movie depicts a lot of violence. There's rape, there's beatings, Turner himself is mercilessly whipped when he's believed to have become too "uppitty" in his preaching, for lack of a better word. The actual rebellion – while softened in its brutality - is still shown to be a violent and bloody one. Parker's performance as Nat Turner was extremely good. He's been criticized by some for (as the director and writer) placing too much of the focus on his own character, but that strikes me as a ridiculous criticism. The revolt is probably the most famous slave revolt in American history and it's remembered as the Nat Turner Revolt. How you could tell the story of the Nat Turner Revolt without focusing heavily on Nat Turner is beyond me. I also liked Aja Naomi King's performance as Cherry. The title is intriguing. "The Birth Of A Nation" seems to deliberately reference D.W. Griffith's 1915 "Birth Of A Nation" - which presented a very different story, steeped in racism and a defence of the Ku Klax Klan, which was just beginning to reorganize as that early movie was released. I'm not sure the point that was being made in taking the name - but it's obvious that there was a point.I think this movie does overcome its weaknesses and offers us a glimpse of some of the issues that confronted the past and that, in some ways, are still confronting the present. (8/10)

Dan1863Sickles Now that the controversy has died down and Nate Parker the film maker has been denounced and banished by the political elite, it's time to take a closer look at THE BIRTH OF A NATION as film entertainment.The story of slave hero Nat Turner should be feverish, explosive, and suspenseful. Instead it's dull, slow, and predictable. White people make promises, and don't keep them. Young Nat Turner learns to read, and soon discovers he is different from other slaves. The Bible seems to comfort him at first, but then it makes him mad. The slaves join him and fight bravely, but everyone dies at the end. Nothing is a surprise from start to finish, except how much screen time is taken up by panoramic picture postcard views of cotton fields and trees festooned with Spanish Moss.Nate Parker has made a very boring movie about a very complicated and charismatic man. It's sad that the only powerful action sequence in the entire film comes when Nat Turner's father beats down a slave patrol and escapes into the night, never to be seen again. That scene takes about two minutes of screen time, and then it's gone. Nothing Nat Turner himself ever does is half as compelling or convincing.Four stars for the film maker's courage in attempting to tell the story. It was a risky move -- and he sure paid the price.