Yeah, I’m shocked I hadn’t seen this until now too. I guess for a long time I wasn’t prepared for a three and a half hour film that, by all s, would blow my mind and change my life forever. And what’s strange is that, for the first half hour or so, I wasn’t sure that that was going to happen. It was astonishingly well made, but my bias against the usual tropes of biopics was seeping through with Malcolm X. But I kept pushing through it, waiting for the second shoe to drop, and when it did, there wasn’t any doubt in my mind that this is one of the greatest films of the nineties. For that opening, even if it does adhere to some biopic tropes, so what? Not only is it a strong opening that sets the tone for the film perfectly without giving audiences too much out of the gate, but it’s also impeccably shot, edited, performed, directed…every important technical aspect of any film, I guess. It was instantly going at a pace where I recognized how Lee would have stretched this to three and a half hours.

But when I say “stretched,” I don’t mean that this goes on for any minute too long. There is so much information packed into this film that the length feels entirely natural, and for that matter, the pacing is consistent enough that you don’t get bored. I generally prefer biopics that exercise more creative liberties than this, up to and including the masterpiece Amadeus, which is all well established, so it may surprise you to learn that I think Malcolm X is one of Spike Lee’s least stylized films. It still clearly has his trademarks in of directorial style, but it’s significantly less formalistic than, say, Do the Right Thing. This is all to say that Malcolm X is a film that has undying respect for and devotion to the incredible man who inspired the film. My other point in this is that, while Malcolm X is far less interested in having characters speak directly to the camera or having symbols represent words and topics, the way it talks about Malcolm X’s life and the larger socio-political ideas that he discussed in represented drives the point home a million times over, making for a film that’s just as powerful as it would have been had Spike Lee made it more formalistic. I knew what was coming for me by the end, as I knew the basic facts about what happened to X, but my jaw was still visibly dropped from that scene through the denouement and on through the credits. It’s that powerful. It started as a strong but not perfect biopic, then the shoe dropped that made it a ten, and then the shoe dropped that made it an all timer. And it’s not even my favorite Spike Lee film. What a fucking talent.

Fucked Up Shit Ville Score: 4/10