Feedback on 6888

This piece is in response to the review of the movie 6888 by one of my favourite movie reviewers, The Critical Drinker. You can watch his review here.

I typically agree with the Drinker’s reviews, so I’d given this movie a pass. However, the wife made me watch it last night, and I’m glad she did. I disagree with his overall analysis.

After watching the movie, I researched the 6888 and was surprised by what I read (try this, this and this). First surprise: I consider myself a WW2 buff, but until I saw his review and then the movie, I had not heard of this unit. It says a lot about the discrimination they went through. Kinda like the Indian units that fought with distinction in places like El Alamein and Monte Cassino, and have effectively been written out of the history of those battles, or the RWAFF who were instrumental in getting the Italians out of Abyssinia and holding the Japanese in Burma, were denied their pay, and have been forgotten. Or is it the Senegalese soldiers who, after taking part in the liberation of France, were not given the honour of marching into Paris alongside their white comrades and then were massacred in Thiaroye when they demanded their owed pay (read about it here and here).

From my point of view, this is not a war movie; it’s a movie about racial discrimination that happens to be set in World War 2, and we should not forget the kinds of walls that were put up against African Americans all through their history in a systematic manner.

I agree with the Drinker’s general thrust against “the message”. It irritates me a lot as well, but we can’t and should not prevent historically disenfranchised minorities from telling their stories. This movie was written and directed by an African American, so it really does not fall under a top-down studio order; it just so happens to have come out at a time when we have plenty of such.