Movie Review: “Django Unchained”
Tarantino, oh Tarantino. Always you. The one who mastered the abstract art of generating the craziest feelings to unknown individuals across the globe. Quentin is the director of masterpieces such as “Pulp Fiction”, “Reservoir Dogs”, “Kill Bill” and “Inglorious Bastards.” It is safe to say every Tarantino movie is an experience; he makes you feel alive at each climax scene.
It is a compelling mixture of feelings that every single human being must experience before dying. The movie at spotlight here is the great “Django Unchained”, directed and written by Quentin Tarantino, featuring nonetheless than Leonardo DiCaprio as ‘Calvin Candie’, Jamie Foxx as the ‘Django’, Samuel L. Jackson as ‘servant Stephen’ and the great Cristoph Waltz as ‘Dr. King Schultz’. The film revolves around Django (Jamie Foxx), a black man in the United States before the Civil War. The film is a western in itself, with many moments that refer to the old ‘bang bang’, especially the time of Spaghetti Westerns.
The conceptual aspect of the experience portraited in vigorous fashion the absolute separation between whites and Black people back before the civil war, the film manages to emphasize this perfectly, and the latent contempt of whites for Blacks is perfectly visible. As the saying ‘first impression matters’, the film certainly catches your attention right away at the opening scene, within the sound of a unique vivid soundtrack, Dr. Schultz meets with its co-protagonist Django in a very unique fashion. Both protagonists pave their journey in the movie within business partners. The Dr. is a bounty hunter as needs to find a trio of bandits known as the ‘Little Brothers’, in which Django knows really well. Therefore, Django becomes a bounty hunter and rides a horse. The despair and fear of people seeing a Black man on a horse is overwhelming. This fear on the part of whites of a Black man being above them is once again quite evident all the time. And this is easily perceived by the character of Leonardo DiCaprio, a farmer slave master, who even wonders why Black people don’t revolt, after all, there are many more of them there (on the farm) than whites.
DiCaprio, however, finds the answer in a suspicious science, which says that Blacks people have skull marks that dedicate them to servitude. This is another point that made me think, as slavery over time was becoming more and more justified. Prisoners of war, people of another race/color, people without God in their hearts… and this scientific motive can easily join this list of fallacies that seek to justify a heinous act of owning a human being.
This subservience is completely rejected by Django who begins a wave of revenge, with a lot of gunfire, scattered guts, explosions and a whole lot of fake blood! In that sense it is undeniable that Tarantino is a master. No one can create such interesting and captivating violence as he can. It was never so funny to watch that dramatic gore, and not because it is exaggerated, but because it was intended to look funny. And it really makes you thinking, how these types of scenes can be so funny, I’ve never felt that way!
Django Unchained is such an overwhelming experience, in a great way of course! It is a very long movie, but everything is perfect, the film starts right away with a jaw dropping cast, not mentioning on the multi-millionaire budget, in which certainly half of it was solely dedicated to fake blood purchases. It is the ultimate bundle, an extremely fruitful historical context into a mentally defying concept/ideal challenge acted by absurdly talented legends of Hollywood history at an actual real time social dilemma of on-going social barriers that actually portrayed it in a very interesting and joyful almost three-hour life changing experience. Wow, let me take a breather. Now that I’ve regained my breath, just please, watch it before you die!