Nadene Goldfoot
I guess I'm a purist when it comes to history. I want true facts, not adulterated altered facts to suit someone's feelings. I was looking forward to a pretty literal movie about the Underground Railroad, something I've known about for a long time and had recently researched again. I didn't get it at all with Prime Time's Amazon showing of UNDERGROUND RAILROAD.
From Academy Award® winner Barry Jenkins and based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, "The Underground Railroad" is a new series that chronicles Cora Randall’s desperate bid for freedom in the Antebellum South. After escaping a Georgia plantation for the rumored Underground Railroad, Cora discovers no mere metaphor, but an actual railroad beneath the Southern soil.
They actually showed a real train in a very deep underground hole in the ground. There was no railroad in this history, though they used the name, meaning another type of railroad.
The idea was from a book by Colson Whitehead, "Underground Railroad." "The Underground Railroad" is about a slave named Cora who grows up on a Georgia plantation and, at the age of 15, escapes through the Underground Railroad.
The Underground Railroad, in Whitehead's reimagining, is literally a railroad with underground tracks and locomotives making stops in different states. That's one of many liberties Colson takes with the real past. Reviewing the book in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani described it as a potent, almost hallucinatory novel that leaves the reader with a devastating understanding of the terrible human costs of slavery. I felt the same way after viewing season 1 in that it was hallucinatory.
Whitehead has told a story essential to our understanding of the American past and the American present." I would disagree with this completely. It was a confused patchwork quilt of pictures and words, not telling the history accurately at all, leaving me confused.
The movie has 10 seasons, but I thought it was completely finished at the end of the 1st, because the listing of characters and people came up as it usually does at the end of a movie. I was just too stunned after watched this version of an important episode in our history, and up came season 2.
I haven't minded a little added flavor spiking up a history. There are some things that can be added that could have happened and do not deviate from the character of the people to make it interesting. Who didn't like THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, or CLEOPATRA, but this is not a legitimate alteration. Children watching should come out of it knowing a garbled set of events that have nothing to do with reality.
Before anyone watches this, I certainly hope they do some real reading about the Underground Railroad, and how it helped get Blacks out of the South and into the North, including Canada. As for me, on with something else.
I've watched lots of movies, series, whatever on Netflix and other places that were pretty mindless, but never felt the need to complain. This was about history. When people feel that they can take liberties and change a people's history, that's going too far, no matter how clever they seem to be. Whether in school or in entertainment, people deserve to be told the truth about one's history.
book, https://www.npr.org/transcripts/489168232
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