The movie is actually split into two parts, “The Argentine” and “Guerilla”.
- The films are shot in completely different aspect ratios.
- I fell asleep during “The Argentine” but I think it’s just because I’m severely exhausted. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t the most exciting movie on the face of the earth and no one would go wrong catching forty winks during a screening, but my sleep was not due to boredom. It was boring in places, but not that boring.
- At the start of each film, there was a long and drawn out sequence with first a map of Cuba then a map of South America with the different regions of each changing colours and being labelled. Audrey said “This is why this movie is over four hours long.” At least we got an intermission.
- Truthfully, “Guerilla” does not need to exist. It doesn’t need to be screened as part of a double bill with “The Argentine” and it doesn’t really need to be watched for its own merits. All it is is “A Year In The Life of Che Guevera: That Time He Failed to Incite Revolution in Bolivia” a.k.a. two hours of watching Benicio Del Toro wheeze his way through the jungle. Nothing happens and there is no sense of one event building on the ones before, it’s just a string of random vignettes of Guevera’s last year before he died. Even the random Matt Damon and Lou Diamond Phillips (yup) cameos don’t save it.
- I don’t feel like either film did a terribly good job providing motive for anyone’s actions. There’s about five minutes of “Woe! Abject poverty!” but aside from that there’s just a lot of running around and shooting stuff. These are the grounds for La Revolucion? I remain unimpressed.
- From what I saw, no one at our screening was wearing a Che Guevera t-shirt.
- There were no credits at the end of this film. It was very, very weird.
- This is four-and-a-half hours of my life that I’ll never get back, so I’m glad I saw it all at once and wasted only a single ticket, rather than taking in the Part 1 and Part 2 options and wasting two tickets.