I am sorry but you need to tell the true events...

I'm sure a great many details were left out; otherwise the movie would have been 48 hours long.
It did go so far as to show a few of the rebel slaves killing slave owners, including Nat Turner gruesomely killing his owner with an axe. It was perfectly clear that this was a violent revolt that would leave most slaveholders dead. Do you really have to see women and children, specifically, get hacked to pieces as well, to make this movie true to history? Not every evil act by slave owners was shown, either. The reign of terror against local black residents following the revolt, involving public murders of both slave and free, is only mentioned in a footnote, not portrayed. And Nat Turner's rebels were shown carrying mostly hand tools as weapons, although in fact they picked up guns as they overran each household. But these details make little difference to the actual story. The question is whether what was shown represents the event accurately and gives us a reasonable idea of how it happened.

In any case, were women and children actually and purposely killed? The rebels might quite reasonably go so far as to treat white women and children as unfeelingly as their owners had previously treated black women and children; but it's not clear whether they did. If you look at contemporary reports, there were many that said so. But then, there were also reports from the 1830s which claimed that the rebels killed women and children almost exclusively, or that they killed many hundreds of white residents (rather than the actual 50 or 60), among a great many stories and urban legends circulating at the time. It's very likely that under the chaotic and desperate circumstances of these attacks, women and children must have been killed as well as men; but whether this was a deliberate part of Turner's strategy is uncertain. One supposed quote from Turner which a Richmond newspaper reporter provided (before Turner's hanging) has Turner stating he and his men attacked indiscriminately at first, in order to create a helpful panic, but had no particular intention of killing women or children, or any men who offered no resistance. Like the earlier rumours, these all have to be taken in the context of a buzz of panicky post-rebellion gossip and weighed against other information.

Now if, as I suspect, your entire point is to make the rebel slaves' attacks seem unjustifiably brutal, I think most viewers are able to take their actions in context. They were fighting an unequal battle against people who bought and sold them as possessions and treated them as livestock, to beat, kill, rape, or otherwise dispose of as they pleased; and who had the support of the law behind them. Their chance of success was never great, and failure would have meant certain death at best. Any such revolution would invariably be ruthless.

But to put the matter in an even larger context, women and children were brutally killed during many military actions of the U.S. over the years, mostly with less solid motives and far less justification than Nat Turner and his followers; and yet the perpetrators are generally considered heroes rather than vicious criminals.


"Moving in for the obligatory hug."

My primary issue with this film is its grotesque lack of historical basis. Nat Turner is not a man to be celebrated any more so than the founder of the KKK is to be celebrated, or the founder of the Black Liberation Army et al.,

He was a violent, hateful individual who promoted indiscriminate slaughter based solely upon race - "armed with hatchets and knives, slave and educated minister Nat Turner and seven of his followers launched a violent rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, on August 21, 1831. Over the course of the ensuing 48 hours, the insurrection grew in size as the number of slaves participating in the uprising—and the number of killings—mounted before the local militia finally crushed it.

The rebellion began when Turner’s small band of hatchet-wielding slaves killed his master, Joseph Travis, along with his wife, nine-year-old son and a hired hand as they slept in their beds. Realizing they had left one family member alive in the house, two slaves returned to the Travis home and killed “a little infant sleeping in a cradle” before dumping its body in the fireplace. As they swept through the countryside, Turner’s men freed slaves as they continued the killings. Upwards of 75 of them joined the uprising over the ensuing two days and killed dozens of whites. "

He was also crazy. "When Turner was 21, he followed in his father’s footsteps and escaped from his owner. To the astonishment of his fellow slaves, however, the future rebel leader came back to the plantation after spending 30 days in the woods because, as Turner reportedly told Gray, “the Spirit appeared to me and said I had my wishes directed to the things of this world, and not to the kingdom of heaven, and that I should return to the service of my earthly master.”

Moreover, his little "rebellion" - which was actually nothing more than an indiscriminate slaughter of white people, whether they were slave owners, whether they abused their slaves or not, or whether they were simply farmers(which a majority of southerners were) - actually resulted in a shift AWAY FROM abolition in the South, and instead the imposition of laws RESTRICTING blacks from being taught how to read or write: "In Virginia, the rebellion marked the end of a nascent abolitionist movement. Months after the insurrection, the Virginia legislature narrowly rejected a measure for gradual emancipation that would have followed the lead of the North. Instead, pointing to Turner’s intelligence and education as a major cause of the revolt, measures were passed in Virginia and other states in the South that made it unlawful to teach slaves and free African-Americans how to read or write. "

Turner was a reprehensible human being who deserves all that he received. His "rebellion" was a huge step back in the Southern Abolitionist movement and yet he is treated as a "hero" for promoting killing based solely on the race of those to be killed. I thought we called that kind of thing "racism"? I guess not if it's committed by those who are of the right skin color.

"Any common-sensible man, looking at the matter unsentimentally, must have felt a certain intellectual satisfaction in seeing him hanged." - Nathaniel Hawthorne on the hanging of an equally crazy individual named John Brown.

Source: History.com - for those who are ignorant and wish to whine of some kind of biased source.

Unfortunately, this movie changes everything about the story. I was hoping for a movie about Nat Turner, instead I got a story about a fictional character named Nat Turner. It's the same reason movies like Braveheart are terrible. Tell the truth.

It showed women and children being killed so I'm not sure what you were watching. I saw children and women being lynched. They even wrote a paragraph telling you so in case you missed that part.

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Another 'whitewash' of history, in no way can a film be made these days which puts even a small negative against a black character, it always has to be black good, white bad.

I knew nothing about this story, as I'm not familiar with american history, but watching the movie I got the message that he killed men, women and children even if it was not shown. There's this scene were he's reading the Bible and the camera shoots the page : "you will kill men, women, babies..." ( sorry don't recall the words exactly ) and I thought he was going to do just that , he thought himself chosen by God to free his people. I think that the film should have mentioned the number of the whites that were killed, as it mentions the number of black people who died in then rebellion, just before the credits at the end of the film, but even if it didn't ( unless it did and I missed it ) I still got the fact that innocents were murdered as well.
I agree it would have been better if this had been made clear though.
Interesting story, and interesting film, as I said somewhere else , I liked it.



"Please, if you are trying to convert me, this isn't a good time"

Most of the white victims were women and children, something like 8 men, 15 women, 28 children. Nat Turner was a psychotic and mentally deranged.