Having won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 2013, 12 Years a Slave surely needs no introduction. It also won Best Supporting Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay. As flawed as the Oscars are, I think it is also illuminating that despite being nominated, it neither won Best Director nor Best Actor, categories which you would normally expect a film like this to sweep up.

This is because this film tells an extraordinary tale that surely deserves to be told and to be more widely known about, and it tells this tale skilfully and competently. Yet at the same time, it takes a completely conventional approach to film-making so there is little that is surprising or artistic about it. Whenever any major decisions about the film needed to be made, the producers and the director seems to have chosen to always err on the side of caution.

This includes everything from how scenes are set up and shot to the story beats that the film tries to hit. But it perhaps shows up most clearly in the casting decisions. For example, I have nothing against Chiwetel Ejiofor. He strikes me as a perfectly competent actor and does a fine job in this role as Solomon Northup. But it can’t be denied that he fails to electrify the audience and completely own the role in the way that say, Daniel Day-Lewis did in Lincoln. Similarly Benedict Cumberbatch seems to have been cast mainly for his genteel demeanour while Paul Dano looks to have been asked to reprise the exact same petulance that he displayed in There Will be Blood. There’s nothing wrong in all this. It’s just that there’s nothing new either.

Another odd failing is that the film seems to have been shot without a large enough budget. You’d think a film with a profile as high as this one could get as much money as it needed. But the lack of funds seems evident in the paucity of wide shots to establish the setting, to illustrate the scale of the slavery enterprise and in the awkwardness of trying to show the slaves being transported on a ship without actually showing a ship.

All that said, this is by no means a bad way to tell this story. There’s a lot to be said in favour of stepping aside and letting the story speak for itself. And of course the upside of being cautious is that the film doesn’t make any mistakes. It accomplishes what it sets out to do: to remind us of what a gross injustice that slavery in America was and directly convey to modern audiences the horror of being owned by a master and of having no control whatsoever over one’s own fate. I especially like how the film subtly indicates that this horror is so great that whether any particular slave owner is relatively benevolent or sadistically cruel is almost irrelevant. They’re all part of the immoral system and knowingly so.

There’s no doubt that 12 Years a Slave is a film that deserves to be watched by as many people as possible. And it’s well enough put together that everyone who has worked on it should be justly proud of what they’ve made. It’s just that under a defter pair of hands, it could have been great rather than merely good and given the extraordinary nature of Solomon Northup’s life and the scale of the injustice done to him and others like him, this is a tale that deserves to be told by a truly great film.