Why I have no interest in seeing Detroit

I have no interest in seeing Kathryn Bigelow’s acclaimed Detroit. The film has not done well at the box office, contrary to filmmakers’ expectations, though it has held its own in the Detroit market. There are questions as to why box office returns have been one third what was anticipated. Beyond getting out the film’s story – about the brutal deaths of three black youths at the Algiers Motel during the 1967 Detroit riot for which there were no convictions among law enforcement personnel - the film’s box office is needed to simply repay its production costs - $55 million. I’m not naïve. I’ve lived with the Detroit riot’s aftermath since moving to this area in 1969, when legal proceedings were still ongoing over what has long been considered a major travesty of justice.  I’ve known about the Algiers Motel incident long before the rest of the world is now being informed of it…..Still, I have no interest in seeing the movie. Why? Several reasons. It's bringing up subject matter that is long over, or should be put to rest. Detroit 2017 is hardly Detroit 1967, when the city’s police force was overwhelmingly white and in many ways demonstrably racist. This film is commemorating – sometimes I think there’s almost celebratory nostalgia for the riot with events taking place this summer in and around Detroit (i.e., Bigelow’s film’s premiere at the Fox Theatre greeted like a New Year’s Eve fete) – an event half a century old when Detroit has attempted to move mountains to get on to a new and progressive path, though the physical and sociological ramifications of the riot still linger. (Also interesting is that no Detroit leaders have spoken out against a film that reinforces the city’s historically terrible image.) The film’s timing also conflates what happened 50 years ago to recent shootings of blacks by police forces around the United States. While these shootings are tragic and in a few cases questionable, their significance is out of proportion to the larger context of shootings by police generally and of police…..Why hasn’t the film done well at box office? My hunch is that it’s the middle of summer (the film’s opening was to coincide with the riot’s anniversary) and people like escapism and not harrowing realism. That a great many filmgoers, who tend to be young, have no idea what the film is about. And, perhaps, like me, a hell of a lot of people simply want to move on to the more progressive present.