Directing: A-
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+
Special Effects: A-

Does a movie have to be profound to be great? This is a relevant question, easy to forget, at least for me, where I tend to approach how I regard a movie from the bottom up: its baseline is far from greatness, which is what it has to prove. I had this experience with the 2004 film Sideways, which didn’t exactly blow me away, but when I realized I could think of nothing wrong with it, I still gave it a solid A. I still stand by that.

Devotion is a wildly different film, and yet I had a similar experience with it. The crticial consensus seems to be definitively mixed, and I went to see it mostly just because I love going to see the movies and I try to see everything I even might enjoy, and I expected to like it fine. And then, it significantly exceeded my expectations.

It strikes me as relevant that the “critical consensus” is still majority-White, and that remains a salient fact. I wish it were easier to seek out critical voices from the same marginalized groups represented in a given film—which is, admittedly, a flimsy and arguably lazy thing for me to say. If it’s really that important to me, I should dig into some research and start bookmarking the websites of relevant reviewers whose opinions I respect.

It should also be noted, however, that the audience score at rottentomatoes.com is 92%, a site notorious for racist user-review bombing, and earned an audience rating of A- according to CinemaScore. I have no idea what the demographic makeup is of these groups, but that strikes me as less relevant; in any case, I am far more aligned with audiences than with critics on this one. I thoroughly enjoyed this movie.

So why, then, is it underperforming so dramatically? Although it feels respectable for it to be ranked #4 at the box office over this weekend, it has earned all of $9 million so far, which is literally a tenth of its budget. This movie deserves better than that.

And in a season of gratitude, I must say: thank heavens for that $90 million budget, which director J.D. Dillard used to maximum effect. It would be easy to compare this film to this year’s other aviator movie, box office juggernaut Top Gun Maverick, which is indisputably far more impressive on a technical level, and earned every penny of its earnings on its own terms. Incidentally, the trailer for Devotion, quite understandably, ran before showings of Top Gun Maverick, which means everyone and their mother saw the trailer to this movie. Maybe people think just one aviator movie was enough for this year? Well, if you bother to see Devotion you’ll discover such an assumption to be incorrect. Because not only does Devotion also justify itself on its own terms, it also features its own impressive fighter pilot flight sequences, with its own impressively integrated special effects—so impressive, in fact, that you hardly notice there are any visual effects at all. People forget that sometimes that’s exactly what makes them impressive, particularly when the use of effects serve only to move the story forward.

I am convinced audiences would be won over by Devotion if they just gave it a chance. This may be a conventionally paced “inspired by a true story” quasi-biopic, but the way I see it, that is very much its strength. This is about the bond formed between Jesse and Tom, two aviators during the Korean War, one of them Black and one of them White, and when it comes to depictions of Jesse’s challenges and Tom’s white guilt, between Jesse’s guarded emotional defenses and Tom’s willingness to listen when it’s most critical, this is the rare movie that does these things right.

Tom is played by Glen Powell, who incidentally also played Hangman in Top Gun Maverick, and his casting represents the “blandly handsome White guy” as much as anyone could. And that’s fine, because Jesse is played by the singularly talented Jonathan Majors, who popped in a breakout role in The Last Black Man In San Francisco, and later carried the HBO series Lovecraft Country—he was also recently introduced as the latest Marvel ultra-villain in the Disney+ series Loki. He is excellent in Devotion, proving himself a worthy leading man who, again, deserves more eyes on his performances than he’s getting.

All of Devotion is set in 1950, just five years after the end of the second World War and thus the same amount of time into the Cold War; the settings, always on or near a Navy aircraft carrier, move from Rhode Island to France to Korea. Jesse has a wife and daughter back home (Christina Jackson is also great as wife Daisy), scared and hopeful as this group of aviators is deployed to Korea at the start of that war, which doesn’t even happen until roughly the third act. And this is where the more thrilling flight sequences occur, which I must stress are worth the wait. There are POV shots from cockpits showing Chinese soldiers scattering across snowy forest hillsides that look very real, and whether there is any CG element to this or it was done with a large number of extras, either way it is visually impressive.

Perhaps most importantly, Devotion is about the bond of friendship, depicted with only just the right amount of sentimentality, and not about spectacle, although it has some of that too. These movies are also worth seeing, and still better experienced in a movie theater. By the end, you might just be weeping—I was—because of the attention to detail, not just in its technical achievements but in the representation of its relationships. This is the kind of movie I often find myself waiting and longing for, in which the director gives the story time to breathe. You really come to know these characters, and thus deeply care about them. And in the end, I left the theater caring about them far more than expected from what clearly looks to many to be a conventional film just like many others. The truth is, Devotion is in a class of its own.

*Exceeds expectations even when you already expect it to be good.*

Overall: A-