Watch Che: Part One For Free

Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Powerful

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

This is a review of all 4.5 hours, for which I dutifully stayed awake. I'm a fan of director Soderbergh, and suppose there's a certain integrity to his evenhanded approach here to the polarizing Mr. Che, but to describe this picture (a la nytimes) as "emotionally distant" is putting it mildly. Despite a reference to executions, Mr. Che comes across as mostly a good, committed sort of guy (M.D.!) who tried to make the world a better place but had a very rough time in Part Two. Mr. Del Toro won Best Actor at Cannes for this. He looks Che-esque throughout and clearly he studied WWCD (What Would Che Do). But basically after 4.5 hours the viewer has sat through 2 guerilla wars and, in my case, not learned anything, certainly nothing about Mr. Che. Maybe there are other reasons to see it. I'm not trying to dissuade anyone.

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.

This is a dramatised documentary based on Che's diaries. You hear the words, but know no more about Che at the end of Part One than he was quite a nice guy with a strong belief in revolution (His views are expounded at length). If I had not seen 'MotorCycle Diaries' I would not have known anything of his background, because there is little here but a detailed reconstruction of his visit to the US and the lead up the the Castro regime in Cuba. And in the extras on the DVD we get the disingenuous remarks of Soderbergh that all he was interested in doing was getting the film made - sorry, pal, but you have to make something that people want to watch, not just walk away!

Listen: I LIKE ERNESTO GUEVARA. I LIKE ALL THE ACTORS. I LIKE SODEBERBERG.So why was this movie so absolutely, completely awful? Ever seen a movie over four hours long where at the end you feel like you know NOTHING about the hero? Ever seen a movie that plods along so slowly that you're begging for it to end... and yet despite all the time and detail, so much is still so inexplicable? If you are a fan or Che or revolutionary politics, go see The Motorcycle Diaries; Che comes across as young, brash, vibrant, idealistic, fun... you feel you know him.This movie, I'm afraid, is essentially retelling, page by awful page, the complete diary of Ernesto Guevara over a period of many years, without bothering to edit, explain, highlight or detail any one page over another. The tedious Marxist verbiage is repeated line for line as Che explains to one comrade or another the essence of the armed struggle; the long, slow daily boring grind of what its like to hide out in the jungle for months at a time is lovingly recreated...This movie needed an EDITOR!!!! Some SNAPPY DIALOGUE!!!! A DECENT SCORE!!! I apologize to all the Che fans out there who probably feel this endless tripe was a loving recreation of his life... but it wasn't... it was merely as exciting as if Steven Soderberg stood in your living room for five hours and READ you Che's diary, in a flat, even monotone.That's how boring it was. Using the same technique, you could turn the greatest stories ever told into unwatchable muck. The truth is that diaries are not good stories, by themselves. You have to figure out which are the exciting parts and which aren't. You have to punch up the dialog a bit beyond the "Then I told my comrade that the revolutionary struggle begins with the armed struggle, that the people cannot support us without understanding the nature of the Marxist dialectic through the viewpoint of a semi-feudal dictatorship...blah blah..." Listen, I KNOW Che was a lot more interesting that that. But sadly Soderberg doesn't bring him out... he hides him.You watch helplessly as Che and his revolutionary brothers in the second movie slowly starve to death as they hide in the jungle, forgetting, apparently, that to have an armed struggle you have to occasionally meet up with other people to struggle with. In retrospect, Che's entire Bolivian foray was probably the worst revolutionary decision ever made, and virtually suicidal; to enter a foreign country, hide in the vast jungle and then expect that somehow you will get the people in the cities, in industry, and on the farms to all join you and your foreign revolutionary brethren from Cuba and Panama and France and England ... but enough on Che's mistakes; let's get back to Soderbergs.The music was simply awful. Long irritating passages of near random noise just got in the way of what little development and action that might be occurring on screen.The dialog was similarly inept. Although better in the first movie, by the time the second rolls around, what little dialog there is is exceptionally wooden.Lastly, about two and a half hours of this movie should never have made it off the cutting room floor. We just didn't need to see the endless trekking through the jungle. The unbelievably slow buildups to most actual action could have been cut in half.Why did Matt Damon show up as a local village elder for a scene lasting under sixty seconds? That annoyed me.I would love to see a good movie about Che that really brings out the man behind the myth. How can you possibly, as Che II does, never mention except once that Che had a wife and five children? Because I really would like to a great movie about Che, and The Motorcycle Diaries would make a good start. I'd pay to see The Motorcycle Diaries Part II and Part III.But Soderberg's Che? Sadly, he comes across as nothing more than the icon we already know... a black and white image, easily silk-screened onto T-shirts.You learn nothing else. In five hours.