| The Six Triple Eight is a movie that knows its importance and occasionally gets a bit too hung up on that. By the time it’s over, it is clear how much this project means to writer-director Tyler Perry who has turned serious for his first big budget, awards-season movie. It also becomes clear why many narrative choices were made that might not resonate with all audiences. | | 2024
Directed by: Tyler Perry
Screenplay by: Kevin Hymel, Tyler Perry
Starring: Ebony Obsidian, Kerry Washington
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The story is told linearly, apart from a few small edits meant to compare and contrast the front lines of WWII in middle Europe to Philadelphia in 1942. I’m a fan of linear storytelling in general but especially for those with an important historical subject. It helps build the emotion better and you do feel more connected to the main characters. The only problem with the linear storytelling in this instance is that we are more than half-way into the movie before the squadron is tasked with their war-time operation. The main plot of the movie is how this team of African American women joined the US troops in Europe and were tasked with the seemingly impossible project of sorting 17 million pieces of mail. And yet we’re over an hour and ten minutes into the movie before that even gets assigned to them.
I’m not going to call everything that happens in the first half filler, because some of it is very lovely and interesting and some of it is important in establishing group dynamics, but a lot of other critics will call it filler.
The movie starts with Lena Derriecott King (Ebony Obsidian), she’s a Black girl in her final year in high school in Philadelphia and she is being courted by her popular classmate, a rich Jewish White boy, Abram David (Gregg Sulkin). While I don’t really think this romance added much in the later scenes of the movie (it is revisited often), the opening scenes of Lena and Abram are both lovely and funny while providing the perfect stage to show the level of racism and hostility at the time – before the Civil Rights movement, but not by much, some people were outwardly and proudly racist while others were lovely and inviting people.
Abram goes off to war and eventually Lena joins the army too. Kerry Washington gets introduced as the Captain of the only African American squadron within the Women’s Army Corps. She has a lot of big military style speeches, which seems extreme and excessive at the beginning, eventually though there is a realization that for this woman to reach the level of authority that she has within the US Military in 1942, that she pretty much has to be exactly like that. Again, by the time we get to the end, the level of research that went into this movie is clearly very high, I’m willing to bet that everything is how it happened. Sometimes to the detriment of the movie.
The movie gives mostly equal time to how the women were treated and how they interact with each other and their personal lives, and then how the racism of the time directly impacts this squadron and these women, and then finally how they actually process the mail and the problem solving that occurred. The last two do have a lot of interesting moments, and the fact that it occurs in Europe in a war-torn part of Scotland really adds to the cinematography which suits the movie and perfectly captures their surroundings.
If told differently, there would probably be less time on the personal lives. However, the reason Lena is the main character with an emphasis on her life story is because the real Lena is still alive and provides commentary for the movie. Finally, I’m going to make a plea which I rarely do, see this in a theatre, especially anybody who is an ancestor of or knows any of the women from the 6888 battalion. The movie ends with the names of ALL OF the women from The Six Triple Eight. I loved that important touch which so few movies do. That really drove it home at the end, and it suddenly seemed unnecessary to nitpick things that occurred earlier.
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