Devotion Delayed Review
Good performances in a film about Naval pilot heroism in one of the U.S.'s many questionable wars, but not as sharp or incisive as it wants to be and not as deep as it thinks it is
Author’s note: This review was originally supposed to run in a publication a couple months ago, but it didn’t. Some recent Twitter discourse about whether or not people had an obligation to watch this movie so Jonathan Majors didn’t end up trapped in the MCU (ignoring the timeline of how contracts are signed as well as the fact that he’s had and has other ongoing projects) reminded me that no one’s read this. So here this goes:
Devotion
Devotion is like if Top Gun and Green Book had a baby, with the level of quality ending up somewhere in the middle. Devotion claims to be “inspired by a true story,” rather than based on one, which typically muddles how accurately events are adapted. Nonetheless, the film is based on a real biography by Adam Makos, and directed by J.D. Dillard, the director of superhero drama film Sleight and survival horror film Sweetheart.
Devotion alleges to be about racism, but not about growth needed by anyone of Ensign Jesse Brown’s (Jonathan Majors) flight team. Glenn Plummer’s character, Hudner, is perpetually surprised by the casual – and sometimes casually ferocious – racism of the 1950s but is frequently willing to stick his neck out for Brown. His character arc isn’t about learning to see Black African-Americans as *people* deserving of dignity and civil or political rights (he more or less gets that from jump and is keen on proving to Brown that he’s a nice guy), but as understanding that the rules as written don’t always get the job done and sometimes endanger the mission.
Devotion mismanages the talent of its leads. The movie is largely on Jonathan Majors’ shoulders but he can’t carry a pedestrian script on its own. To the film’s credit, the dialog avoids cringe-inducement, it’s just a mostly average if relatively congruous plot. The most intense moments of racial anguish are Brown (Majors) yelling selections from a bigotry journal – he’s written down every hateful word ever spoken at him – at a mirror. He claims he finds the process cathartic. Directors and DPs seem to love putting Majors’ face straight in front of camera – we saw it in 2021 with The Harder They Fall – and Majors likes doing a voice or an accent, which we saw in Loki and will soon see in the next Ant-Man movie. Plummer’s smirk is from a more benevolent character here than as Hangman in Top Gun: Maverick, but it’s still charming. They’re two gorgeous men who I’d like to see back together in a less nauseating picture, which unfortunately as I type I realize will almost definitely be under the MCU umbrella.
The film’s moral-political issues are inextricably tied to structural problems in its quest as a message movie – it has little new to say in the tradition of self-congratulatory war Americana. It’s a merely okay film that’s convinced of its inherent greatness. Part of this is the lie of American involvement on the Korean peninsula as “the forgotten war.” In Korea, where the war is technically still ongoing despite a 69-year armistice, it is not forgotten. What is forgotten in the U.S. is the fire and fury that American planes rained down on the citizens of the DPRK; the tens of thousands of bombs dropped in the alleged name of protecting freedom and democracy. This film makes a chest-beating moment out of it, neglecting any shame or introspection. It’s a film about the cost warfare takes from warriors, but – as usual – is only concerned about the American side. For its part, Devotion’s disinterest in explicated politics is evident in the voice of the commanding officer – he qualifies a claim that intervention in Korea is necessary for stopping the spread of communism with a note that that comes from Washington, D.C. His goal is to get home and to get his men home; he doesn’t think about the question of “why are we going in the first place?” anymore than he’s directed to.
Devotion is exemplary of several negative trends in media, or perhaps simply traits of the American filmmaking industry. For one thing, it is a showcase of the American tendency to cause great death and destruction in other parts of the world and then mourn about how sad it makes us. And about how valor and sacrifice unite people across race lines in service to American geopolitical interests.
There is, somehow, not a shortage of films about Black people facing racism as they integrate into the American imperial armed forces. It’s part of Fly Boys – a film about American volunteers in France before the U.S. formal entry into World War I; it’s the point of Red Tails and its HBO film predecessor The Tuskegee Airmen. It’s a big part of the Civil War epic Glory, a small part of the Civil War biopic Lincoln, and it even features in the Watchmen TV show and Detroit, the film about police murder during the 1967 riots in the eponymous city. Almost all those pictures do a more incisive job of talking about structural racism in the U.S. military. In this movie, there are a couple of bad apples and you see the Black people on the navy ship mostly work below deck, but most of the explicit racism Brown went through happened off-camera before the film started. There are hints at but little interest in issues of structural racism. Self-congratulation about how far we’ve come without consideration of why it took so long to get “here.”
Devotion is a film intent on telling Americans that every time we kill abroad it’s just and righteous and our lives matter more than theirs anyway. It’s also coming at a time of intensified saber-rattling in the pacific, as Ju-Hyun Park wrote in The Real News.
The broadest critique I can make about the perpetual visual worship of warplanes and warfare is that planes are cool and it’s truly saddening to be reminded constantly that the cutting edge of technology is always in service to death, destruction, and the expansion of U.S. military, economic, and cultural hegemony. To say nothing of the cost of planes held against the many unfed mouths in the imperial core. Devotion is a film of little artistic value, and most humorously it’s not even the best U.S. Navy aviation propaganda out last year, by a long shot.