Powerful

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

hyped garbage

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

I'm totally critical of all kinds of ideologies and 100% against personality cult. I have my own opinions and know what is good and bad in both capitalism and communism. One may dislike or even hate Che Guevara, who also executed people, but he'll have to acknowledge that he was very courageous and sincerely motivated to help poor people get a better life. This can't be said about people like Lenin, of course.I found Part Two better than Part One, with more tension, but probably because when you know a story is not going to have a happy ending, then it's even more interesting. The movie as a whole is "only" good, but with del Toro's very convincing performance, it comes close to being excellent.

Apparently this movie (well, both of them, actually) completely bombed at the box office. Outside of a few ex-hippies and leftie grad students at Berkeley, no one saw this movie. And, in the time since, it has disappeared from the public scene. The fact that this movie has only 52 comments on this site (The Phantom Menace has nearly 4,000) shows what little effect it has had on the public consciousness.In contrast, there's another movie about a GENUINE Freedom Fighter that did much better. I'm talking, of course, about "Braveheart". That movie became an international blockbuster, earned an Oscar for Best Picture, and his still beloved by millions of fans to this day. William Wallace was everything Che wasn't, a genuine patriot fighting against a foreign tyrant who oppressed and abused the people against their will. Che was a faux revolutionary who, after helping turn one country (Cuba) into a totalitarian dictatorship, then went abroad and tried to use force to impose his evil ideology on the people of other countries, who, to their credit, wanted none of it.In sum, Wallace was the Real Deal, and is still an inspiration to true freedom lovers to this day. Che was just another Marxist turd, a megalomaniac with a Messiah complex, a guy whose image appears on the T-shirts of assorted self-proclaimed "Hipsters" and pseudo-intellectuals who think Cuba is great because they have government run health care but, rather than move there and enjoy the fruits of the great People's Workers' Paradise, sit here at home and write angry screeds about the very country (America) that, quite unlike Castro's Cuba, gives them the freedom of speech to do so.

It helps to know that this was originally brought to life as a Terrence Malick screenplay about Che's disastrous forray in Bolivia. Financing fell through and Soderbergh stepped in to direct. He conceived a first part and shot both back to back as one film trailing Che's rise and fall.He retained however what I believe would be Malick's approach: no politics and a just visual poem about the man behind the image, exhaustive as the horrible slog through Cuban jungles and windswept Andean plateaus must have been. Malick applied this to his New World that he abandoned Che for, lyrical many times over.But Soderbergh being an ambitious filmmaker, he puzzled over this a little more. Here was a man of action at the center of many narratives about him, some fashioned by himself, conflictingly reported as iconic revolutionary or terrorist, charismatic leader or ruthless thug, erudite Marxist thinker or brutal soldier.So how to visually exemplify this contradicting ethos as our film about him? And how to arrange a world around this person in such a way as to absorb him whole, unfettered from narrative - but writing it as he goes along - off camera - but ironically on - and as part of that world where narratives are devised to explain him. As flesh and bones, opposed to a cutout from a history book.One way to do this, would be via Brecht and artifice. The Korda photograph would reveal lots, how we know people from images, how we build narratives from them. Eisenstein sought the same in a deeper way, coming up with what he termed the 'dialectical montage': a world assembled by the eye, and in such ways as the eye aspires to create it.So what Soderbergh does, is everything by halves: a dialectic between two films trailing opposite sides of struggle, glory and failure, optimism and despair. Two visual palettes, two points of view in the first film, one in the presence of cameras hoping to capture the real person, the other were that image was being forged in action.The problem, is of course that Brecht and Eisenstein made art in the hope to change the world, to awaken consciousness, Marxist art with its trappings. By now we have grown disillusioned with the idea, and Soderbergh makes no case and addresses no present struggles.But we still have the cinematic essay about all this.The first part: a narrative broadcast from real life, meant to reveal purpose, ends, revolution. The second part: we get to note in passing a life that is infinitely more expansive than any story would explain, more complex, beautiful, frustrating, and devoid of any apparent purpose other than what we choose as our struggle, truly a guerilla life.I imagine a tremendous film from these notions. Just notice the remarkable way Part 2 opens. Che arrives at Bolivia in disguise, having shed self and popular image. No longer minister, spokesman, diplomat, guerilla, he is an ordinary man lying on a hotel bed, one among many tourists. Life could be anything once more, holds endless possibility. Cessation.What does he do? He begins to fashion the same narrative as before, revolution again. Chimera this time. Transient life foils him in Bolivia. Instead of changing the world once more, he leaves behind a story of dying for it. We have a story about it as our film, adding to the rest.

I've read up a little bit on Che before watching this film and you wanna know something, he was a real hero for the people because he only wanted to see equality for everyone and that he hated what the oppressive forces were doing to his people as well as all other Latin Americans in general! Now, I don't know about others, but to me he did the right thing by wanting socialism so that everyone had to pay their fair share. However, the powerful elite obviously weren't going to go for that. So, rather than understanding what Che Guevera wanted, they were forced to kill him in attempting to suppress the revolution. It didn't work since there were too many of his other followers who only picked up where he left off. A good example of this was when Castro continued his leadership in Cuba. As far as I'm concerned and as Che said it himself right before he died: "If you kill me, that's fine. But you're only killing a man, you'll NEVER kill the cause!" I couldn't have said it any better myself.But ... ANYWAYS.... that's why I give this film a 7 out of 10.