I hated this movie. There isn't an ounce of authenticity in and it was just so bland. It was a movie about a black person made for a white audience to feel warm and fuzzy with a superhero angle thrown in. At least it didn't have the white slave owner turn out to be a nice guy (and they sure came close).

The score is distractingly bad. It's an overbearing and manipulative score, ripped straight from any Lifetime movie. Then there is the opening scene showing a group of slaves gathered in front of their white slavemaster and establishes the fact that the bad guy is bad. It felt so amateurish to me and the rest of the movie then proceeded to feel similarly amateurish, cliched and predictable. On her first trip south, Harriet has what is supposed to be an emotional reunion with her family, but it's a bunch of characters we've never met so the scene just doesn't work. There are just so many things like that.

It's such a shame because Harriet Tubman was such a heroic and interesting figure and her story is an important part of American history. I feel like this movie is getting a pass from the critics because of the material. I know I feel somewhat guilty writing a bad review merely because of the subject matter. Maybe what is needed is a Ken Burns style documentary so that the temptation to have cartoonishly cardboard baddies, scenes of singing Harriet, and heavily dramatized and fictional scenes for the sake of checking all of the 'Biopic Cliche' boxes can be resisted.

A number of the reviews I've read here on IMDb are decidedly negative on "Harriet", citing facets of her life that were inaccurately portrayed in the movie. I've seen enough films based on historical figures to know by now that historical accuracy isn't always of the most paramount importance when making a film. Whether the real life Harriet Tubman ever picked up a firearm isn't what's going to make me give the movie a thumbs down or not. Not knowing much about her history other than the dedication she showed in freeing as many fellow slaves as she could, I thought the picture did an admirable job of telling her story. Cynthia Erivo appears to have been an excellent choice to portray Araminta Ross Tubman, resolute in her quest to obtain personal freedom at the expense of her own life were she ever to be apprehended by Southern slave catchers. The hatred for Blacks and the cruelty slave owners were capable of is demonstrated by her former 'owners', notably Gideon Brodess (Joe Alwyn) and his mother Eliza (Jennifer Nettles). More so via dialog than by actual physical punishment; we are not witness to some of the horrors that were exposed in "12 Years a Slave", 2014's Best Picture Winner at the Oscars. An overall fine cast and compelling story makes this one of the year's best offerings, and certainly a contender for it's share of awards in due course.

HARRIET is a typical Hollywood biopic that presents the life of its character in a glossy and perhaps sanitised way. Apparently, this one is more fiction than fact, heavily inventing key parts of the narrative and maybe losing something along the way; after all, I'm a sucker for the truth and fictional characters don't have much place in true stories. It's handsomely mounted and well acted, but there's something a little too reverent and sentimental about it which detracts from the experience overall.