The poster for Spike Lee’s World War II film, Miracle at St. Anna, has premiered at Cinematical, and it’s really just not very… good. The concept of the image – a child being comforted by a soldier who is (!!!) black – is fine, but there’s something about the composition of not only the image (we only see the soldier’s arm) and the poster itself (the title is shoved off to the corner) that just doesn’t quite connect.
I’m still excited about the movie, which shows the rarely-depicted heroism of black soldiers in World War II. You’ve likely seen the reborn kerfuffle between Spike and Clint Eastwood (and by the way, Spike’s critique of Eastwood’s Iwo Jima movie comes from having met a black veteran who fought on Iwo Jimo, not from just being a ‘troublemaker’ – but reactionary white folks don’t care about that shit), and St. Anna is in many ways Spike’s reaction to Eastwood’s movies. Again, you can complain all you want about a filmmaker’s statements, but when he backs them up with movies, everybody wins.
Miracle at St. Anna opens on September 26. Click here to see the full poster at Cinematical.