SnoopyStyle
Part One is called The Argentine and takes place from the early 50s to the eventual victory of the Cuban Revolution over the Batista regime and then Che Guevara (Benicio del Toro) addressing the UN in 1964. Most of the movie is in Spanish with some English as Che Guevara is interviewed by Lisa Howard. The movie culminates with the street to street battle in Santa Clara.This movie is held up by two tent poles; the directorial skills of Steven Soderbergh and the acting skills of Benicio del Toro. Both are formidable and they have created something unique. However this artistic endeavor left me a little cold. The back and forth in time leaves the movie with a disconnected feel. The movie comes off as a series of 2 minute vignettes that jumps around. The cinematography is great but it keeps Che at a distance. He's portrayed simply as an unswerving committed revolutionary. It isn't able to dig up another layer to the character. Maybe there isn't another layer to the man. The Battle of Santa Clara does get pretty intense which is unlike the rest of the movie. This is not a traditional biopic.
Leofwine_draca
CHE: PART ONE is an enjoyable history lesson detailing the rise and rise of Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevara, following his early years as he hooks up with brothers Raul and Fidel Castro and sets about engaging in a guerrilla warfare in Cuba. The direction by Steven Soderbergh is understated, the director preferring to have this feel almost like a documentary, following the rebels on their path to success.The raw, cinema verite style is this story's strongest asset, that and the fact that Benedicio del Toro feels like he was born to play the role. Despite the lengthy running time, the story holds the attention, and the frequent battle scenes are very well handled and believable. The only part I didn't like was the constant cutting away to dull, black and white scenes of exposition with Guevara being interviewed in later years; they should have let the straightforward storytelling speak for itself.
geoffreybaker
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.
