CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Bluebell Alcock Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

Rio Hayward All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Nicole I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

mozartwwr There are so many that take this mini series as an empirical truth, in the end Mr. Haley committed the worst sin of an author.

Casey Reeves Let me start off by saying I don't hate this series. In fact, it is actually quite good. The problem is Roots has become somewhat of a black culture idealization of what slavery was like, and it is not even historically accurate.In the 18th century, the West African slave trade was a seasoned machine, and other than the Portuguese, "white men" rarely set foot on the continent for more than a few weeks, as they lacked the immunities to fight off many of the diseases that were prevalent in the region. As such, the slave trade was really conducted at the auction block, after the slaves were captured. "White men" didn't often go and capture their slaves themselves, they bought them from tribesman and other more prominent African slave traders. The concept of owning slaves has existed well before the invention of the boat, so until the invention of the boat and then the pressures from the Catholic church and other churches to stop enslaving its own people, slavery was a way of life that rarely migrated beyond the immediate reaches of that particular countries borders.It is only in recent centuries that slavery crossed oceans, a time when everybody was purchasing slaves. Half the population of Ireland was wiped out, lots of poor European countries were wiped out, the Philippines even up until the early 1900's, West Africa, East Africa, China, Russia, etc. There is obviously an agenda with Roots as the writer has personal feelings of animosity however I feel the historical inaccuracy for the beginning of this mini-series seriously hurts the amount of respect I can give to the show as a whole.Like I said its good if you are looking at it as a fictional show and nothing more, but if you ever use Roots to combat someone who actually knows history, you will lose every time.Roots trivializes the slave trade for the black community and creates a slanted view at the atrocities that existed far before a black man was ever enslaved.

Royalcourtier Too many people still believe that Roots is the true story of Alex Haley's ancestors. It is their story, all right, but almost entirely a work of fiction.Mr Haley's claims to have spent 20 years under-covering his family history were quickly found to be false. The book (even Haley admitted it was a novel, and "largely" fiction) is a work of the imagination, not history. And not even his own imagination. It was freely plagiarized - whole pages intact -from the work of Harold Courlander - who incidentally wasn't an African-American.Roots is compelling TV, but like Frankenstein or The Shawshank Redemption, it is a work of fiction, and a mistake to read too much into it.

afijamesy2k This TV movie and mini-series is like no other has ever seen, it not only change the way we look at our ancestors, America, it has also change the world forever, this great TV movie featuring Kunte and the crew and the rest is history, great performances by the cast, wonderful story, terrific cinematography, wonderful writing and everything else, your know the 1970's was a depressing time for America, disco, Watergate and many others that has hurt the world deeply, this, star wars, close encounters of the third kind brought us deeply closer together, I Wanna thank Alex Haley and the crew for letting my watch this great mini-series and it will be on for many generations to come.See this TV movie like no other.