Che: Part One - The Argentine / Part Two - Guerrilla

Two-part biography of the man in the beret's career in revolutionising.

Having in 2005 seen the earlier set The Motorcycle Diaries, I tried to think of these two later biopics as The Motorcycle Reloaded and The Motorcycle Revolutions respectively. Admittedly though, horses do prove a little more practical in the bloomin' jungle.

Steven Soderbergh's documentary style of direction, whilst dispassionate and uninvolving, is also free to breathe easily. Little of this fly-on-the-tree perspective feels like a movie. Well, except for the train crash. I'm not used to seeing those in real life.

The famous freedom fighter himself is portrayed more as a man of peace, who converses in a civil manner with his enemies, and flexes his medical muscles whenever possible. After all, in the real world that this works so hard to reflect, there are no clear-cut goodies or baddies.

Accordingly, I also couldn't keep track of the sprawling cast of characters, and the politics lost me quite quickly too. However, Che's plans are exposed here with clearer motivations and objectives than in his own autobiographical Bolivian Diary, which the final film is based upon. It's interesting to recognise some of his own prose getting adapted here as conversation.

Che's order 600 execution is as matter-of-fact as all the other deaths that we witness.

Definitely not an emotionally engaging film, more of a history lesson.

As such, I recommend taking notes, but writing them a bit bigger than he did.

(available here)