Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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37 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Strong words softly spoken, 25 Jun 2009
A fascinating life story that was both turbulent & doomed is told with subtlety & restraint. Where many would have made a summer blockbuster war movie Steven Soderbergh instead paints with a gentle hand so that an almost serene & dreamlike quality is achieved. Many saw this as ideal material for Oliver Stone, with opportunity aplenty for dramatic shots of soldiers dying and a relentless pounding anti-war theme. In some respects, on occasion, Stone's pace & drama would be welcome but on the whole would have left this unbalanced & unfocused.
We follow Che from his first meetings with Fidel Castro quickly through to his involvement in guerilla warfare in a battle to take control of Cuba. Scenes of 'in the field' fighting & training are interspersed with black and white newsreel style scenes of his time in New York. The first 15 minutes are a little confusing as the timelines flit all over the place but eventually things settle down and a juxtaposition between his role as representative and soldier.
At first the battle sways back & forth with Battista's forces holding the stronger ground but bit by bit the revolution begins to take hold and the inevitable victory finally arrives. It is at the moment of victory, with Che on his way to Havana that the first part ends.
The second part see's Che head off to mainland South America in the hope of effecting change across the continent. Starting in Bolivia he begins to start another training campaign but his deteriorating health begins to hold him back & the battle is a wholly different one to that faced in Cuba.
Soderbergh uses handheld cameras for the second half so that gone are the slow, steady sweeping shots of stunning tropical scenery to be replaced with juddering , jarring shots of claustrophobic jungle that closes in on Che as his soldiers fall and the inevitable approaches.
This was never going to be a laugh riot and sure enough as the story progresses so that dreamlike feeling returns, whereby the main character seems to be constantly running but unable to get away & becoming increasingly helpless. However he remains defiant & assured of his mission throughout.
From stunning scenery to sudden bloody battles and moments of camaraderie throughout a vivid & memorable picture is revealed of Ernesto Guervara. To this end Benicio Del Toro is quite outstanding in his portrayal of Che. No grandstanding or scene stealing here in fact quite the opposite as he plays his character as a quiet & thoughtful man, more at ease working amongst the people as a doctor yet always wishing to return to the jungle to fight once more. Ruthless yet insistant that his soldiers be literate & show respect for the peasants that they come across. The scenes with him struggling to overcome his increasingly debilitating asthma are a tribute to the subtlety and deftness of touch that this actor brings to the role. Del Toro didn't miss out on an Oscar, he was robbed!
This has been a little sidelined in the media as being 'worthy',(a euphemism for boring), and too long. True enough any film in excess of 4 hours is going to test the nerve endings in your butt however a little patience is a small price to pay for such an enjoyable & thoughtful film experience. This avoids the heavy political stance that Stone would no doubt have brought to the table,(although with such a long look at one man there was always going to be a little bias), and can easily be watched as a biopic of a true one of a kind man. Agree with his motives and ideals or not this makes for a fascinating & very watchable movie that is well worth your time.
The picture is excellent, particularly in the first half with vibrant, deep colours. The sound too is well mixed with extensive use of the sub in battle scenes and excellent separation. Too the dialogue is centered well and clearly,( a nice touch whenever Che is being interviewed off camera during a scene is the first word or two being in Spanish but then fading into English as he speaks),.
The extras are extremely poor and sound a loud warning that there is very likely to be an all bells & whistles edition at some point in the future.
Highly recommended.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A great portrait of Che, 30 Jul 2009
I feel Soderbergh movies are an acquired taste and the viewer needs to know how he handles action before watching a movie ,having said that I feel the does it better in Che than in his previous movies.
For a topic like this it can be very hard to present a objective view of Che without trying to make him look "too good " and the film excels at that offering a good balanced account of his life from the arrival in Cuba until his death.
Filmed in Mexico and Puerto Rico great care was taken to make it look as real as possible and the result is excellent .Campeche in Mexico looks very much like Santa Clara ( albeit the Mexican city is slighty richer ) and the jungle location are spot on.
The second movie is different and more claustrophobic filmed in La Paz and the mountains of Toledo ( just south of Madrid ,Spain ) shows Che as a looser when things begin to go wrong ,the uprising is not supported ,the locals are unwilling to help and radios break down ,is a different and sad Che trying to keep discipline ,some sense of mission and stay alive.
It offers a balanced view of Che in a movie which can be too long at times but will be enjoyed by those who prefer direction ,tension and script ( the thin red line ) over action sequences ( peral harbour ).
The extras are very intersting ,I found Soderbegh's point of view was waorth watching.
4 1/2 stars . Great movie , no masterpiece.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A fascinating, somewhat flawed project, 14 Jul 2009
Very much a film of two parts (two films?), part one focuses principally on the year-and-a-half leading up to the 1959 Cuban revolution and part two concentrates on Che's ill-fated year-long Bolivian adventure from 1966 to 1967. The complete omission of the intervening years is in itself a serious weakness of this film.
Part one is excellent, its success largely due to the time-shifts so often criticised. The film opens in the US in 1964 with an interview with Che in which the question is posed whether or not US-sponsored reform might not be an alternative to revolution in South America. From there we flash back to Cuba to see the brutalities of the Batista regime in 1952 and from there we shift to Mexico in 1955 where we meet the revolutionaries in exile, whose discussions of the (previously graphically-portrayed - important!) dictatorship in Cuba make it quite clear that so-called reform is not an option. The rest of part one focuses on Che's role in the Cuban revolution from 1957 to 1959 with periodic time-shifts to Che in the US in 1964. These time-shifts enable the director to convey extra dimensions to the story in a subtle and unobtrusive way. Thus the combination of Che's actions and experiences in the field combine with the US scenes to give significant insights into his ethics and philosophy, revealing a profoundly humane and practical man with an unshakeable belief in truth and justice. In the field, Che reads during his rest-break, encourages his fighters to study, and emphasises the importance of education: "a people who cannot read and write are a people easy to deceive". In Che's revolution, the people join to fight, but also to learn.
Part two is a rather rambling account of Che's Bolivian adventure which lacks the extra dimensions of the first part. It follows Che's training activities and periodic confrontations with the Bolivian army through to his demise in la valle de Yuro. It is less effective precisely because it lacks the political and ethical dimensions that the time and scene shifts create in part one. The striking Bolivian miners, for example, are referred to on a number of occasions, but never represented directly. This is a major weakness. Nor - apart from the occasional encounter with a mountain peasant - is the socio-economic reality of Bolivia conveyed to the viewer.
The high point throughout the film however is Benicio del Toro's fantastic portrayal of Che. Each nuance is perfect!
A final (slightly technical) note on translation. It is entirely to the film's credit that the Spanish-speaking characters speak Spanish and that we have English subtitles. But unfortunately the translation is adequate rather than good. It is weak on two counts. One, it just doesn't convey the colloquial register of the protagonists, especially in part one: we often get stilted, formal English equivalents. Two, the frequent emphatic expressiveness of the Cubans in particular simply doesn't come across: we get a bland, "unmarked" English translation. This seems to be because the translator shies away from marked English syntax. While English might not have the syntactic flexibility of Spanish (in the colloquial verb-subject option for example), it does have much more flexibility than this translation recognises (and as a dip into functional linguistics would reveal). In short, the translations should really be better when they are of such central importance.
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