Although it lasted more than two hours, the film took almost no time to introduce the cause of the riots. The audience was thrown directly into the middle of a huge riot. For those who do not understand this matter, the riots, anger and confrontation between races seem to have no reason. To give a simple example, in order to pave the way for the police and the National Guard's violent reaction to the sniper, the film added a shot of a little girl peeking at the tank in the early stage of the film. This clip tells us that the police are very sensitive to snipers. But why is the army so sensitive to snipers because of the huge casualties caused by snipers? Is it because there are a large number of snipers? The video did not talk about it. A huge riot must have two sides: one is violence from the people, and the other is authoritative suppression. The director took distinctly different approaches to the violence of the two parties. Observation of the violence of the people was obviously withdrawn and calm, while the violence against the police was perceptual and meticulous.
When the riot reached its climax, the audience was suddenly thrown into a joyous, isolated party. The people in these hotels seemed ignorant of the riots. Next, someone jokingly fired a toy gun at the police. The police thought that a sniper was sneaking on them, raided the entire hotel, and tortured everyone to confess, and eventually killed three people present.
As a film about the riots in Detroit, the director’s entry point was chosen for this tragedy that occurred in a hotel. Because we have been around the cause of the riots, we as spectators do not actually have a deep understanding of the tension between the white police and the black hotel guests. This led to the brutal violence that followed for more than an hour while deterring the audience without a sense of moral support. Similarly, the film barely explains the background of the white policemen and the black hotel guests. This resulted in the whole hotel being more like a horror movie scene in the end, rather than a scene of racial confrontation and police violence. The three white police officers became a symbol of pure evil, and the abused black man resembled a flock of lambs. After watching the movie, you don’t know why there is so much violence, you don’t know where the hatred comes from, you only know that a group of bad guys abused a group of innocent people.
Unlike the director’s previous work, the bomb disposal expert, Hunting Bin Laden, this movie does not emphasize the inner conflict of the characters, does not describe the changes that the characters produce with the change of the situation, but only purely shows evil. The movie spent an entire hour in the middle of the hotel corridor, extremely patient, and even repeatedly showed violence from police officers. Repeated violent scenes, hand-held cameras without gaps, and the police's unchanging evil make this terrifying scene gradually unbearable.
When we watch a movie about "Detroit", we should ask for more. We want to know what happened in Detroit, we want to know why these things happened, we want to know some living people who existed in that era. The director only gave us a movie with a clear moral and a simple evil. Maybe the director did this to avoid some sensitive racial topics, maybe the director, as a white woman, is reluctant to touch the black community too much. But avoiding these topics in a movie about racial conflicts makes the whole movie lighter. Of all the victims, the most rebellious and brilliant were not the Vietnam War veterans, but two young white girls.
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