Devotion

AMC A-List has been such a blessing for someone who creates all of her content around film and tv, Devotion was a film that my husband really wanted to see and I honestly went into the movie knowing absolutely nothing about it. If you’ve been following me for a while, you know that's my favorite way to go into films. I like going in having absolutely no expectations whatsoever. I was hooked after the first five minutes. I have a very specific thing for war movies that center around aviators, I went through a very long Pearl Harbor and Flyboys phase. Devotion is an excellent addition to my favorite flier movies.

I’ve said for years that one of my favorite parts of Lord of the Rings is the male relationships. How raw and vulnerable they are, how well the men show emotions. Now this is something that war movies tend to do as well. In a world where men still don’t understand how to express their emotions without violence, ironically war films do an incredible job at depicting comradery, love and friendship between men. Though I would love for men to see these movies and not think that they have to go to war in order to act like human beings, these movies are a good start. I also love the relationship between our two main characters was complicated, they weren’t best friends right away, they had struggles. Jesse was a friend and Tom simply didn’t understand that they didn’t experience the world in the same way. But when it mattered, when it counted Tom was there for him.

After some reading it also seems like this movie was a pretty good depiction of the reality of Jesse Brown. I appreciate reality and accuracy in movies like this because I feel it's more respectful to the men and women who actually had to live through these events. Also nothing writers can come up with or imagine is going to be as grounded or emotional as what actually happened. I find historical war movies both difficult to watch and inspiring, they are in fact the only films that inspire some level of patriotism in me, perhaps because they are so good at humanizing history. We sometimes forget that real people fought and died and lost their friends and loved ones. But movies like Pearl Harbor, Flyboys, and Devotion give those people faces and they tell their stories.

Something that my husband pointed out that I wholeheartedly agree with is how beautifully shot this movie was. Not just the flight scenes, which were in fact incredible and breathtaking, but all of the scenes. They were long and still and allowed the actors to actually do their jobs without an insane amount of cuts that only come from a director trying and failing to be artistic. Films with lots of cutting do nothing but distract the audience from poor storytelling. Devotion did an incredible job of letting the actors be the focus and not some bizarre, over ambitious cinematography.

Devotion got some not great reviews and I’ve come to realize something, the people shitting on movies like this are the same people that claim that Marvel is devoid of emotion and that the CGI in Marvel and DC films makes them unwatchable. If you didn’t like films like Devotion or Babylon or The Whale….then you don’t like movies. You aren’t watching to feel something, you want mindless, brainless action but somehow also heartfelt stories? You’re confused and you need to go take a nap and reset because all three of these movies were incredible and quite frankly that isn’t up for debate.