Before I present my opinion of the film I saw tonight, let me warn you that I am not a Latin American history expert. This ignorance is one of the reasons I wanted to share some thoughts about Steven Soderbergh’s latest film. It makes me sad that such a historic film like Che is largely ignored. Ignored completely in the Oscars, too. It’s funny to me that Americans are still threatened by Communism. I’m often inspired by any person who has a goal, sometimes no matter what that goal is.
I mean, we all get outraged by things and there are things that make us angry and maybe for a while we get angry enough to actually go do something about it. But we’re talking about a guy who for ten years, every day, got up and did something really difficult. And chose the hard way to do it. That’s not normal, especially in someone who’s an atheist. – Steven Soderbergh, Director of Che
Che Guevara was not a blood-thirsty dictator. Most of the film takes place in the wilderness, so we see a grassroots (literally) revolutionary who understands the people he is fighting for. I’m no political expert, but I was pleased that the film could challenge the pascifist in me.
The best way to encounter Che, is to let go of words like ‘film’ and ‘movie’, words that somehow seem inadequate to the task of describing such a mesmerizing, fully immersive cinematic experience. By the end of Che, viewers will likely emerge as if from a trance, with indelibly vivid, if not more ambivalent feelings about Guevara, than the bumper-sticker image they walked in with. – Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post
For some reason, films easily inspire me. I have to keep resisting reading Cuba’s history on Wikipedia as I write this! I doubt you’d go to see the movie because I recommended it, but do it so you can think about how Che’s revolutions have relevance to internationalization, capitalism, and poverty today. Or you can go just to see about a life. The filmmakers didn’t take their research on this film lightly – it took seven years to complete.