Amistad is about a mutiny that occurred in 1839 aboard a slave ship, The Amistad, which eventually lands in a New England port. The West Africans who commandeered the ship are taken into custody, and the plot revolves around who "owns" them or whether, in fact, they should be freed. This sets up the film's main event, a courtroom drama about rights and origins, with the requisite flashbacks to the voyage and the gruesome conditions aboard the ship. The problem with this approach is that we learn less about the actual conditions of slavery and instead focus on the more sanitized conditions surrounding the courtroom. Furthermore, we get a film that is largely about the efforts of the white people fighting the case and much less about the struggles of the Africans themselves. There are too many threads in the film that lead nowhere. At one point Cinque raises an interesting point of international law that could help the case. Although legal minds are inspired by his intuition and initiative, the idea is quickly dismissed as impractical and he plays almost no role in designing the case that could lead to his freedom. The events on the slave ship are even more scattered. Five is involved in a brief eye-contact relationship with a young woman but there is no development that gives him emotional power. The woman's death is as shocking as it is unexpected, and while it works as a good visual, her undeveloped role as a real person results in the loss of any deeper meaning. Additionally, the Amistad case is portrayed as a spark that helped spark the Civil War, but the film doesn't go into detail. It simply flashes forward and shows that the civil war had begun. Furthermore, the fact that few strong personal bonds develop between the main characters to give the story the emotional strength it needs hurts the film's dramatic level. There is a clear link between the leader of the Africans, Cinque, and the young lawyer who works for his release. However, the strength of this nascent relationship is not convincing. Furthermore, the situation is seriously disrupted when control of the defense team is assumed by the elderly ex-president, John Quincy Adams. Additionally, the film lacked depth in the Supreme Court room. Only one version of the issue is presented in Washington: that of the Amistad prisoners.