On Movies & Movie Watching: Amazon Delivers ‘Devotion’ – and I Also Get a Small Refund!

One of the many reasons why I love shopping on Amazon and pre-ordering items – especially movies or books – is that the “world’s biggest e-retailer” offers a Pre-Order Price Guarantee, by which consumers get a refund or are charged a lower price on their payment method – usually a credit/debit card – if the price of the item drops between the time the order is made and the product is shipped or delivered.

Sometimes, of course, the lower price is only a dollar or two less than the original “at the time of pre-order” one. In these tough inflationary times, though, even a dollar or two makes a difference, so anytime that Amazon sends me an email telling me that the Pre-Order Price Guarantee kicked in and I saved a couple of bucks, hey…I’m a happy camper.

Such was the case this afternoon when I heard the “incoming mail” bell that replaced – many, many, many years ago – AOL’s famous vocal prompt of “You’ve Got Mail!”  I had just published Tempus Fugit (Countdown to the Big Six-Oh Edition): Hazy, Fragmented Memories of Birthdays in Colombia and was about to attempt a “real battle” on Second Front, and since I usually don’t get a lot of personal emails (I, for my part, sometimes suck at being a good email pen pal), I only went to my inbox to see if it was another phishing email to be sent immediately to the Spam box.

Nope. The email was from Amazon. It read:

Hello,

We’re writing to let you know we processed your refund of $5.81 for your Order (number deleted).

This refund is for the following item(s):

    Item: DEVOTION

    Quantity: 1

    ASIN: B0BMLGVNGS

    Reason for refund: Pre-order Guarantee

    Here’s the breakdown of your refund for this item:

        Item Refund: $5.40

        Item Tax Refund: $0.41

We’ll apply your refund to the following payment method(s):

Visa Credit Card [expiring on xx/xx]: $5.81

I didn’t plan on getting Devotion, which is based on the true story of Ens. Jesse Brown, USN (Jonathan Majors), and Lt. Tom Hudner, USN (Glen Powell), two naval aviators who flew dangerous combat missions off the carrier USS Leyte during the Korean War. Directed by J.D. Dillard and written by  Jake Crane and Jonathan Stewart, the movie delves into the bond of brotherhood that grows between Brown, the Navy’s first black fighter pilot, and Hudner, a white officer who joined the Navy during World War II but did not see action before the “Big Show” ended in 1945.

I have not read Adam Makos’ Devotion: An Epic Story of Heroism, Friendship, and Sacrifice, but Brown and Hudner’s story is part of the narrative in Hampton Sides’ On Desperate Ground: The Epic Story of Chosin Reservoir–the Greatest Battle of the Korean War, a book that I bought in 2021 but have not finished reading.

So, even though I don’t know the small details of Brown and Hudner’s story, I did read the part of On Desperate Ground where Sides tells us what those two airmen did during the horrific Battle of the Chosin Reservoir in November of 1950.

I have not watched Devotion yet. It arrived yesterday afternoon, and even though I could have watched it right after I published yesterday’s post, I stuck to my usual routine. By the time I got off my PC, it was already past 9 PM – much too late to watch a feature length film without falling asleep in the middle of it.

Devotion was one of the two movies ­– The Fabelmans being the other – that I wish I had seen at the movies. I tend to gravitate toward stories about military pilots (although I really don’t have too many movies about them) and true stories, so I took a chance and bought Devotion just because I was intrigued by the true story – or what I little I knew about it from reading On Desperate Ground.

It’s still relatively early here in Lithia, so I’ll give the movie a first look as soon as I have dinner. The one downside: Paramount Home Entertainment, which was given the distribution rights even though Columbia Pictures was the releasing studio, only offers the 4K UHD Blu-ray and a digital copy…no 2K Blu-ray. So, I’ll have to watch it in my room rather than on the family room set.

On the bright side, though, I can watch it and not worry if I am preventing someone from watching something else.