Why Glory Endures Beyond Its Flaws

I’ve always found that certain films don’t meet you where you expect them to. They don’t arrive in a blaze of brilliance or flatten you with virtuoso performances. Instead, they come in quietly, almost cautiously, and then, long after the credits, something in them keeps working its way through your thinking. Glory is one of those films. You can admire it, critique it, feel its seams and its missteps, and still recognize that it carries a truth heavier than its imperfections. It’s rare for a film to be both deeply flawed and deeply necessary, but Glory never pretends to be anything else. It moves with the gravity of a story that has waited too long to be told, and, like many long-delayed truths, it’s messy, conflicted, uneven, yet somehow carried by a moral force that steadies everything around it.

When I first saw Glory, I knew the outline of the 54th Massachusetts the way many Americans do, a few paragraphs from a textbook, maybe a museum plaque read once and half-remembered. The film doesn’t begin by scolding us for that ignorance, nor does it pretend its approach is the definitive telling. It announces itself instead as a witness, a retelling shaped by the limitations of Hollywood, the pressures of mythmaking, and the earnest desire to honor men who were never meant to be forgotten. The story it presents, the rise of a regiment built from free Black men and formerly enslaved men, the tension of being welcomed and doubted in the same breath, the fatal march on Fort Wagner, has the clean structure of an epic and the sorrow of a tragedy. Yet even within that familiar arc, the film asks you to sit with the things history tends to turn into abstractions: fear, humiliation, dignity, rage, hope.

What sets the film apart isn’t its reverence for the subject but the way it lets the contradictions breathe. The soldiers of the 54th are both symbols and men. They stand at the center of the Union Army’s moral argument. Yet, they struggle through petty cruelties, a shortage of shoes, withholding of pay, and having to fight not just the Confederates but also the indifference and condescension of their own side. The film never lets you forget the many layers of conflict the regiment endured before it ever reached a battlefield.

But Glory also sits squarely in its late-1980s cultural moment, and you can feel that tension as the film unfolds. It’s a movie that wants to center Black heroism but seems convinced it needs a white point of entry to do so. That pressure is written directly into the narrative structure: the story opens with Colonel Shaw, follows his letters, and orients itself through his gaze. It’s not a malicious choice so much as a predictable one for the period. The result is a film caught between two impulses, one noble, one compromised, and the friction between them becomes part of its character.

Shaw, as played by Matthew Broderick, is a strange figure to build a war epic around. He’s earnest, reserved, and determined, but never fully inhabited. Some of that is the writing. Some of it is the pressure of turning private letters into an emotional spine. And some of it is Broderick himself, who often seems more overwhelmed than transformed by the events around him. The film tries to sculpt him into a leader of substance, someone whose convictions deepen as the regiment faces injustice. But at key moments, you can feel the weight of the story outpacing its protagonist. He is not the emotional center, and the film senses it even when it won’t admit it.

That imbalance becomes easier to understand when the film shifts its attention to the men behind him. Denzel Washington’s Trip is all sharp edges, wounded pride, and defiance. Morgan Freeman’s Rawlins carries the earned wisdom of a man who has lived long enough to know what the world takes and what it sometimes gives back. Andre Braugher’s Thomas is the hinge point, the measure of what a free Black man in the North could aspire to and what he still had to endure. These men give the film its pulse. They anchor the narrative when the camera lingers too long on Shaw’s distant steadiness.

And yet, and this is the part that I find the most compelling, even Washington’s performance, for all its fury and the now-canonical single tear in the flogging scene, doesn’t completely define the film. That moment is powerful, no question. But Washington’s Trip can sometimes feel constructed around those bursts rather than developed through a deeper interiority. He is written as combustible, emblematic, the regiment’s anger made flesh. Washington does what he can inside that frame, but the character is always half-man, half-symbol. The film needs him to embody something more than himself, and that burden sometimes hollows out the spaces between the big moments.

None of that weakens the film’s impact. If anything, it clarifies how Glory really operates. This is not a film measured by individual performances. It’s a film that works through accumulation, the rituals of training, the humiliations of prejudice, the sudden tenderness in brief quiet scenes, the slow forging of a group identity among men who had every reason to doubt their place in the army they volunteered to serve. The acting doesn’t carry the film. The ensemble does. And through that ensemble, the film delivers something larger and truer than any single character study ever could.

What still surprises me, after all these years, is how carefully the film holds its contradictions. It wants to be precise but bends history for emotional clarity. It wants to elevate Black soldiers but filters much of their experience through a white commander. It wants to honor the specific heroism of real men but populates the regiment with fictional composites. It wants to be realistic, yet the score swells with mythic grandeur. It wants to tell a story about a regiment that changed the Union Army’s thinking, yet it knows audiences will remember the final charge more than the systemic shift it helped spark.

And still, it works. It works because the film understands something that reaches beyond its choices. It understands that history isn’t shaped just by who won or who lived. It’s shaped by who stood where others told them not to. It’s shaped by who showed up despite the odds. It’s shaped by men who carried a flag up a narrow beach, knowing the angle of the rifles waiting for them.

The Wagner sequence is where all of this comes together. The fog, the hymns, the tightness in the soldiers’ faces as they prepare for a battle they know they may not return from. The sound of the surf. The silence before the order to advance. The way the men walk, slow and steady, carrying every humiliation they endured, every doubt those in power placed on them, every hope they still managed to hold on to. The storm of rifles and cannon fire that meets them. The chaos. The resolve. The flag rises again after Shaw falls, because someone had to lift it. After all, someone always has to lift it.

You can point to what the film simplifies or omits. You can pick at historical inaccuracies. You can critique the acting, the choices, the framing. And you’re right to. Those things matter. They shape how stories endure. But what remains after all that, what still stands when the critiques settle, is a film that did something American culture had resisted for far too long. It insisted that Black soldiers were not footnotes. It insisted that their courage was not decorative. It insisted that they changed the trajectory of the war. And it insisted, quietly but firmly, that their story belonged at the center of our remembering, not the margins.

That insistence stays with me. Because Glory is not just about the 54th. It’s about the long lag between action and recognition. It’s about how easily a nation can praise sacrifice while ignoring the people who offered it. It’s about how we build monuments only after we have made peace with forgetting the people behind them. And it’s about how stories like these, imperfect, earnest, conflicted, become the way we keep certain lives from being erased.

I think that’s why the film lingers. Not because it’s flawless. Not because the performances are uniformly great. But because it asks us to consider how many people, in how many eras, did the right thing long before the country was ready to admit it. How many men marched into the dusk carrying someone else’s burden? How many stories do we inherit only after the urgency of their moment has passed?

Glory doesn’t answer those questions. It doesn’t need to. It simply stands there, forty-plus years after the events it portrays, and offers us a picture of people who refused to wait for permission to matter. And maybe that’s why the final moments, the burial, the sand, the indifferent morning after the carnage,  land the way they do. They remind us that recognition is always late. That courage isn’t always rewarded. That the country the 54th fought to save was not yet ready for them, and in some ways still isn’t ready for others like them.

But the film remembers. And because of that, so do we.

Film stills from Glory (1989), © 1989 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. and TriStar Pictures. Used here for critical commentary and analysis under fair use.