You might need to save your money on popcorn and purchase a notebook for movie, “Birth of a Nation.” Although it lacked an entertaining element, “Birth of a Nation” was an informative and empowering movie for people of all backgrounds. Director, Nate Parker did a great job of answering the question of who Nat Turner really was. He made sure that his audience left the theatre with some knowledge about slave revolt leader Nat Turner.

People learn in textbooks that Nat Turner was just an angry slave who murdered whites in a revolt, but the movie shows that’s not the full tale behind the man with the axe. “Birth of a Nation” illustrates Nat Turner’s progressions as a preacher and how he used the bible to captivate slaves. The decision to make Nat Turner’s backstory a great deal of the movie had the effect of humanizing this historical figure.

However, the decision to focus on Turner’s backstory took time away from showing the slave revolt itself. It was confusing how a movie made about a rebellion leader didn’t thoroughly cover the actual fighting -especially on a topic like this. People want to feel the emotion of vengeance when the slaves revolting against their masters, and the audience was left short of that. It felt as if the moments of action-packed fighting were too fleeting to really be enjoyed. The whole movie built up to the big showdown, the rebellion, and it went by too quickly for viewers to cherish the gore moment. The romance element introduced was yet another distraction to the revolt. This element is definitely part of Nat Turner’s backstory, but  not one that needed to be covered for an extensive time. By the halfway mark, “Birth of a Nation” appeared to be a Romantic Drama. The longer the movie goes, the more you feel drawn away from what everybody came to see in the first place.