Tyler Perry’s new war movie is garbage


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Disrespectful AI-generated nonsense: that is the nicest way I could describe Tyler Perry’s “The Six Triple Eight.” This is a film bordering on racial caricatures we have not seen since the 1910s. It is so cartoonishly awful I genuinely wondered if Woodrow Wilson’s ghost possessed Perry and created this film to intentionally incite racial hatred amidst the already divided American climate. I have never been for the prohibition of any historical drama, except for perhaps the Lost Cause-promoting “Gods and Generals,” the video game “Call of Duty: Vanguard” and this film. This film needs to be deleted from living memory — or at least reproduced more competently — for its gross injustice to the people it portrays and to history itself.

You might be asking: why the visceral hatred? What about this film evokes such strong emotions? This film is about the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, essentially an army unit for mailwomen, and more specifically the most predominantly Black American women’s Army unit sent overseas during World War II. While not perhaps as riveting as stealing a submarine or taking a key village, mail was important for the psychological aspect of the war front — for morale. It was in fact in the 6888th’s very own motto: “No mail, low morale!”. So what is so wrong with a film about a Black female unit clearing America’s mail backlogs for troops on the front?

The film opens with a battle scene that I can only describe as AI-generated domestic refuse. We see the Italian front of 1943, a particularly vicious sector of fighting between Allied and Axis forces. The American officer calls for his men to move up, and immediately they rush out at a German trench line … less than a hundred feet from them. Where’s the precluding artillery barrage? Why haven’t both sides started shooting each other months ago at such distances? Any sort of faint logic transforms into what feels like a ChatGPT-written combat script compilation as the Germans themselves leap out to charge at the onrushing Americans. Both sides are literally running past each other as overhead planes fly at altitudes so low that it’s a wonder their bad-CGI propellers didn’t vaporize everyone into pink mist like the Hydra goon in “Captain America.” Conveniently, one of these planes crashes into American lines, even more conveniently with the unnamed soldier character first shown at the beginning. The deceased American pilot coincidentally has no buckles to hinder soldier-kid’s rescue of his body. The pilot has a letter from a sweetheart back home, which is pocketed. Following the battle at camp, the soldiers complain of the lack of reply from letters. Turns out America’s mailing system has taken a backseat to warfighting, and this is beginning to affect the GIs.

The scene cuts back to a year prior, with our protagonist Lena Derriecott Bell King (played by Ebony Obsidian) facing the typical racial troubles of 1940s America, as an Evil White Woman™ criticizes King’s boyfriend, Abram David, of “making a spectacle” by picking up a Black woman. This is odd considering that the film itself presents a racially and gender-integrated high school near Pittsburgh. King actually went to the racially and gender-segregated Germantown High School in Philadelphia. What impact the portrayal of the troubles someone like King had to go through is lost, as the scene comes off more as a checklist for “racism in scene #2” than an actual example of societal problems. What is also odd is the film’s artificial drama with King’s mother and aunt: the former believing Lena shouldn’t date a Jewish guy and that her education will strain their finances, and the latter supportive of Lena’s relationship and her education. In reality, the Kings were well-integrated into the local Jewish community, with Lena’s mother working at a Philadelphia synagogue and her aunt running a kosher store. David is eventually sent off as a volunteer for the Army Air Force, only to be killed shortly after on his first mission. Grief-stricken, King finds motivation to join the Army Air Force. She meets faces like hers, including Major Charity Adams (played by the ever-talented Kerry Washington), organized as part of the 6888th battalion, one unit among thousands that represented millions of mobilized women who were now in a war economy that needed welders, clerks, secretaries, switchboard operators, radar operators, mappers, cooks and, eventually in the 6888th’s case, postal backlog clearing.

The mail problem had gotten so bad that First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune pushed for the 6888th to fill the role of sorting through the 17 million unsent letters. Facing them in the film is the cartoonish and fictional General Halt (played by Dean Norris), who does not believe Black women, or for that matter Black people, capable of achieving equal or higher success than whites. As part of the trials and tribulations thrust upon the women by Arrogant White Officer Bigotry™, the 6888th are sent overseas to handle their task. Unfortunately for them, the racism doesn’t stop when they go overseas, as General Halt attempts to sabotage the unit with bad living conditions and unrealistic working quotas to repair an abandoned building. Once their new headquarters is set up, the 6888th begin to get to work with diligent efficiency, all the way from early 1945 to the end of the (European front) war in May 1945. The unit does suffer some casualties when two 6888th drivers encounter an unexploded German bomb (this remains unexplained in the film as German air raids by plane stopped being a factor after 1944). In reality, the unit suffered three deaths from an automobile accident, but the decision to show two of these real-life women incompetently drive into a bomb is a disrespectful alteration for simulated drama entirely.

General Halt continues to show up (as well as other white officers) throughout the film as an antagonist, constantly trying to find a way to disprove the 6888th’s work and send them home. Halt would be a good antagonist that could be taken seriously for the power he holds mixed with his bigotry, if only his overexaggerated and cartoonish mannerisms did not dominate every aspect of his being. He is not a character, but a racist stereotype of a southern man with his constant bad twangs and mumbled words. To give a crueler twist to all this, the very real general who reviewed the 6888th was Lieutenant General John C. H. Lee, an advocate for the usage of Black volunteers in depleted American units who overlooked segregation laws at the time. In regards to the 6888th, he not only accepted their service readily, but spoke positively of Major Charity Adams, even writing to her father on her qualities as a leader. To replace the real man who oversaw the 6888th with ultra-racist Hank Schrader is not only disrespectful to the memory of Lt. General Lee, it is also an extremely racialized attack that is so despicable that the film loses any merit it holds whatsoever.

I stand by my words in the beginning that this film should be physically eliminated and/or remade entirely. It does nothing good, but besmirches the honor and legacy of real people by merging or replacing them with fictionalized hyper-racist caricatures that do nothing positive to the current social environment, not to mention WWII historiography and history overall. This film also smears the names of good actors and actresses who worked in this movie. I do not think Tyler Perry’s attempt at bringing a Black American WWII story to screens was done with any serious regard to history; it was done to piggyback off of the real stories of very real people to satisfy a bloated ego.