134 minutes a tour de force

Around 1900, the author Henry James and a group of his friends undertook a tour of the southern USA, trying to investigate its economic decline.  Friendly with the anti-slavery campaigner Fanny Kemble, James and his confrères sought to establish if the South had only slavery going for it.  They concluded that it had and the Emancipation of the slaves had plunged it into penury, something for which the South had only itself to blame for maintaining such inefficient practices that could only work through slavery.  Over 100 years on, many in the South have still to come to terms with the American Civil War defeat.  There are many in Britain who thought and think the South's cause was noble - at about the same time James was conducting his sojourn, Lord Salisbury, the late nineteenth century British prime minister, opined that London should have used force to defend the South, faced as it was 35 years later by the united USA superseding it in sheer economic power.  This is a wrong-headed view as amply demonstrated by 12 Years a Slave.
The subject of the film led no fewer than six production companies to attach itself to the project (something which would have enraged Homer Simpson).  British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor leads a powerful cast and his acting is majestic.  It fully justifies its length as you know eventually that Solomon Northup will gain his freedom, but at each turn the hope that emerges turns again to despair as it is repeatedly dashed.  The film leaves one's heart heavy but burning at the manifold injustices perpetrated by the likes of Tibeats (Paul Dano) and the psychotic Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender).  Truly, slavery was one of the most monstrous institutions of evil that was on Earth in modern times, a cruel, vindictive system that bred and legitimised sociopaths.  Even kinder slave owners such as Mr Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch) were still practitioners of it and regarded slaves as property rather than people.  And as with all unjust systems, it intimidates the good, even Mr Bass (Brad Pitt) who turns out to be Northup's key to salvation.
Tragically, in the antebellum age, Northup never saw justice for his kidnappers, though prosecuted, were acquitted because as a black man, he could not testify in a court of law.  Even the date (possibly 1863), circumstances and location of his death are unknown so we will never know if he lived to hear about Lincoln's Gettysburg address and the 1865 law abolishing slavery.  The savagery to which he was subject must surely have shortened his life.  What one is left with is that the South had to be defeated and so the process of the fight for racial equality (which still continues) begun.  I would give this powerful, moving film five out of five.