It's awards season, can you feel that hum? That energy? The glory of movies about actual things full of crying scenes, miserable people, triumphant moments, smiling teary faces and shots of artsy locations. It's palpable, and with that comes Steve McQueen's first attempt at an audience-friendly piece of work, 12 Years A Slave, the story of a well-read black man in New York in the mid-1800's who is conned and kidnapped and sold into slavery, where he faces the horrors of the Southern slaveowners and the harsh realities therein. Whilst music often bellows to remind the audience it's all quite intense. Except... for as good as the performances of the cast, it's not intense. It's not a horrible vision of the disgusting side of humanity. It's not an indictment or a discovery, it's not a docudrama, it's just empty. A void of faux-emotions, some well-shot hanging/whippings and Michael Fassbender almost killing a poor girl with his bits. To say the film is decidedly average is a disservice to the performances, almost all range from strong to amazing, and certainly the artsy location shots are very good, but there's a niggling feeling throughout that this film could have been something, done something, yet it never does.

The story of Solomon Northup's deception and sudden thrust into a truly horrible existence is clearly one full of tragedy, horror and sickening thoughts and acts, yet all the way through Steve McQueen's film it feels like we're being coddled, not closely hugged exactly, but like a half-hearted step-mother's attempts at showing kindness in front of guests, just enough to make the appearance of sweetness, but neither truly soppy nor lacking a human connection, and as such a sequence where Northup has to try and deal with a fellow slave who won't stop crying loudly, openly, at all times isn't sickeningly casual in the dialogue, despite best efforts, nor played up to an overwrought emotional level. It just exists. And that's all that can be said about the way 12 Years A Slave has been brought to the big screen. It just exists. It wants to live, but it is being held back from all potential.

Thankfully the cast that includes Michael Fassbender, Sarah Paulson, Paul Giamatti, Paul Dano, Scoot McNairy, Taran Killam, Benedict Cumberbatch, Brad Pitt, Lupita Nyong'o, Garret Dillahunt and Adepero Oduye handle the material well, and very rarely do the bigger names detract from the telling of the story by looking like they do (Killam with his recent SNL 1800's newspaper critic character does seem to make separation form that and this tough), but it is Chiwetel Ejiofer's film through and through, and rightfully so as the man has deserved this kind of attention for over a decade now. As a leading man, though, he struggles with a script that puts him in the background all too often. Ejiofer remains memorable long after the credits and the rest of the film fall away, but it's unfair to the man that he'll be given awards for his work here when he should be in films that present his talents all over the shop, not in drips and drabs between times when Steve McQueen has stopped trying to be an artist and given in to big budget empty vessels.

There's so little to really examine with 12 Years, a film with such potential wasted in every opportunity, yet with the kind of push that means Oscar glory somehow awaits. It's not the worthy and important film it clearly feels it is, it's not an interesting look at some horrible times, it's just a thing, and film that happens and then ends and that's it. The lack of being able to linger on the experience is really damning for a film about such a brutal subject, and maybe one day a filmmaker will work out how to make a film that's worthy, interesting, bold and shocking and yet human, but 12 Years A Slave most definitely doesn't do any of that.