4/5

God damn this is actually really good. It hits basically all the right notes for a complex telling of the role of black soldiers in the mid-war. This movie understands the Civil War as the transformative event that it was, and chooses one of the strongest vignettes of that transformation in the 54th. The paternalism of the white officers, the abolitionist attempts to drag the country towards progress, the real-life heroism of the black soldiers of the Union. All that shit makes it in here with an absolutely stacked cast. I wanted less time with Shaw and more time with the men, but for a 35 year old film I was impressed.