Every couple of years a cultural sensation bubbles out of Hollywood, resonating with many and astounding all. Many may be led to believe that would be ‘A Minecraft Movie’ but, surprisingly, there’s something slightly more profound hitting theaters.
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners has become an unexpected smash hit since it was released in theaters on April 18, being rivaled at the box office only by ‘A Minecraft Movie’ and ‘Revenge of the Sith’. The movie offers the most entertaining package of the year filled with great characters, action, horror, sex, drama, comedy and powerful commentary about Black history.
Ryan Coogler is no stranger to extended metaphors about the Black experience. His 2018 box-office breakout Black Panther reached one of the largest movie-going demographics with a powerful, albeit somewhat messy commentary on black infighting and the historical striving for success and excellence. But where Black Panther takes an introspective look at Black history, Sinners looks out, specifically at the colonization of Black culture in the Jim Crow era, with a not-so-subtle, yet necessary metaphor for culture vampires being represented by, well, vampires.
The first half of this two-hour-17-minute-long film is devoted to establishing characters, their motivations and their goals in what comes across as a pretty standard feel-good story about a pair of entrepreneurial twins looking to start up their own nightclub for the Black folks in town. This hour of establishment is necessary for the turn the film takes at the halfway point, where it becomes an outright action thriller about a group of heavily armed colonists and musicians fighting until the sunrise against an army of literal vampires.
While it is blatantly obvious what the Irish-jig dancing, banjo picking, pale white vampires are meant to represent, the manner in which the movie executes this commentary is beautifully subtle. The vampires mean more than just racism and appropriation. They don’t wish for genocide, they don’t wish to colonize, they wish for culture. They wish to have the music, dialect and history that all the Black people in the club share. When a person is bitten by a vampire, they become part of the vampire hive mind, where everyone, from white, to Black, to Asian, share a collective background. A background with no individuality. A culture stripped of its identity.
The music that’s played within the movie embodies this. It’s established in the opening (and later on in one of the most incredible dance sequences ever put to film) that those who have a deep connection with music have a spiritual connection with the universe that spans the past, present and future. It’s this universal connection that attracts the vampires, and leads them to the club in the first place. The vampires don’t want to just take the music and claim it for themselves, they want to share it. To be included. In a way the vampires are similar to the Black people who find solace in the Juke Joint. Impoverished people in Ireland during the 30s were discriminated against and treated as not-equal in the eyes of those with power. They were beaten down and forced out of their country, where we find them in the movie. Going from home to home, “sucking in” the culture around them, until they run into the Juke Joint. Denying their own heritage in favor of adopting a new one, effectively drawing the life out of the Black culture that would spend the rest of history trying to claim it back. Sinners acts as a retrospection, as well as a call to action, to celebrate the rich cultures we all come from, and to not let anyone take them away.
What easily could’ve been a hobbled mess of ideas and misguided commentary ended up being the most potent work of art the year has seen. Although it’s no longer showing in its intended IMAX format, Sinners is an absolute must-watch in theaters, and at the very least should be rented and streamed as soon as made available. This will not be a movie you’ll want to miss.
