explodingcat

The movie's fantasy scenes are great, and the best bit of the movie. But the rest of it was very much story by numbers. In fact it was melodramatic pap that wrote itself. The good guys were oh so good, the bad guy oh so bad, the characters clichéd as far as they could be, it was in the end kind of silly, which for a subject as bold as a civil war, is not good. The main girl also had more than a touch of Anne Frank about her visually speaking, which may have been just me, but again added to the trite feeling of the overall movie

But the fantasy scenes were really good, and if the movie focused more on these, rather than the rudimentary main storyline, it would have been better.

This movie really didn't do it for me. I knew going into the movie that Idi Amin was a ruthless dictator, and i left the movie knowing about as much as when i went in. The film completely failed to tell you what was going on in the country, it was touched on, but never really engaged. And this was the same of the whole movie it was great on touching on things but failed to go any deeper.

The film suffers from several flaws. One it is a fiction involving real characters, which always is a dubious mix. Second the main character, the Scot, is unlikeable and unsympathetic. Third the end of the movie has no tension, and is hastily put together. Further the chronology of the movie is completely indecipherable. It apparently takes place over 5 years, but it could be several weeks for all we know.

The movie truly fails in that it fails to tell the story of Amin, or the people he killed. At the end of the movie i didn't feel any emotion at all. In fact if you didn't know any better he just seemed like a generous bloke with a bit of a temper. The film makers needed to do better than this if they are to tackle such a huge subject, and instead of a study on mass murder we are given fluff about a graduate position gone sour.

The little dudes taking on the big dudes. We all like to see it, and we love to see them win.

The problem with this documentary is not so much the content but the lack of it. The story of Argentina is told by the film makers, and by the factory workers. Great, but they are not really experts, are they? An academic would have been far more credible. Unfortunately the film makers were loyal to ideas close to their hearts, and they should have been loyal to the truth, wherever that lies, I'm not sure as the film was partisan, to the point of cartoon. Unfortunately i left the cinema thinking it only told me half the story, and as such I couldn't trust it.

Facts were replaced with chants. There was one scene of a riot which tried to make the rioters out to be heroes and the police out to be violent oppressors (rather than people doing a pretty fundamental and difficult job already without having a bunch of people throwing bricks at them)which didn't wash well with me, and the difficult issue of the workers taking a bunch of very expensive equipment was never really explored. Was it intended that those who paid for it would be compensated, or was it to be donated to them in the interests of trying to keep a business running? One of many questions never answered.

The world isn't black and white. This documentary made it out to be just that, and as such, insults an audience which knows better