MOVIES: REVIEW
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 a bar on Detroit’s Near West Side, a neighborhood of mounting tension after decades of mistrust between local citizens and mostly white cops. On the night of the raid, the bar was hosting a celebration for service members returning from Vietnam. Angry locals, exhausted by persistent police excess, gathered outside to watch the patrons being packed ofito jail. As the cops drove away, bottles fiew. That escalated into fires, looting and violence, with the National Guard and state troopers called in. After four days, 43 people were dead, most of them black.