It's on VOD. I watched it. While it has some very poor plot contrivances, it isn't the worst movie I've seen this year (there are about a dozen of those, the worst offender being "Me Before You" - "Sea of Trees" is Citizen Kane compared to that - then there's Suicide Squad, Batman vs. Superman, ad nauseam. Hail Caesar…

I think what you are all railing against was, in fact, historical record. Real lives are messy and it is to Ross' credit that he presented them as such (the relationship between Newt Knight's two wives for example).

A beloved story among neoConfederates is "Robert E. Lee freed his slaves". Robert E. Lee was an impoverished soldier who married an heiress. His father-in-law had left instructions in his will that Lee - his executor - should free all his slaves upon his (the father-in-law's) death. Lee finally, grudgingly freed them…

Actually Newt Knight was more of a Bernie Sanders than a libertarian. The Collins family who supported him became among the first socialists in the US. One of the Collins named his kid Ulysses Sherman Collins just to piss off his neighbors.

The new textbooks right-wingers in Texas tried to get into circulation (and luckily failed) described enslaved people as "servants".

It's actually ironic that this film might be condemned for being a "white savior flick" (it isn't) when it might be the only way to reach young people in the South who have been indoctrinated into belief in the Confederacy to understand the real truth of how the Confederacy destroyed the South (right-wing Southerners…

Nat Turner died 35 years before the Civil War. His rebellion was certainly justified though the slaughter that followed would have played better historically if he had limited himself to the slaveowners.

As y'all have evidently never ventured south of the Mason-Dixon, here's Time's take on just how much unreconstructed Confederates are going to hate this movie.

I assume you are a Yankee. Right-wing Southerners, neoConfederates, white supremacists, Confederate flag waving "Lost Causers" ("It's not about hate, it's about heritage!") have been spamming any discussion of this movie since it was first announced. They know how to hate and there's nobody white Southern racists hate…

I saw it and I loved it but I'm a history nerd not a fan of make-believe people with make-believe powers running around in spandex. I like real heroes and real flesh-and-blood villains who told stories that have a relevance to me today.

It's an incredible story that stretches through the Civil War into Reconstruction and Jim Crow - an era that has been ignored in pop culture.
There have to be a ton of obscure stories like this one, largely lost to history. Maybe if this one's successful Hollywood will start looking instead of making XMen No. XXIV.

I loved the meme where Woody was looking at the snuff film and being freaked by it and they substituted the scene of McConaughey stripping.

Between all the Confederate flag wavers ("it's not about slavery, it's about heritage!") and all the ultra politically correct ("goodness gracious me, is that a white savior movie?"), it's going to have issues. But the story is so extraordinary.

They were indoctrinated by the planter class back then and they are indoctrinated by the equivalent of the planter class (the GOP) today.

You obviously haven't been keeping tabs on discussions (like I have, having read the book). The "Lost Causer" neo-Confederates (who exist in surprisingly large numbers and who claim slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War, it was all about those pesky "states rights") know damn well who Newt Knight was and he's…

Movie is released on June 24th, not in May. I've read the book. It's an incredible story and what is even more incredible is that nobody knows about it.

The screenplay for this and the upcoming Demolition were on The Blacklist and I read both. They're similiar (man gets widowed, goes nuts and questions his existence). Demolition tries for a sort of black comic vein (we'll see how successful that was when it opens), Sea of Trees is a ghost story and whether you buy it…

SPOILER………

Some guy on reddit posted a couple of months ago that he'd seen the screenplay. According to him the story has been totally changed around and starts with the story concentrating on Roland, Jake and the Man in Black and is told from Jake's POV. According to him (and it's starting to sound like he wasn't talking out of…

I don't trust him either. But in this instance, the film is directed by somebody he loathes and stars somebody else he loathes (Wells took his beloved Leo's loss of an Oscar for Wolf very, very personally and trashed McConaughey in Interstellar). So compliments from him are more than surprising and possibly reliable.