SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Bluebell Alcock Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

Rosie Searle It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

frusciante370 This movie is a one sided whitewash that portrays Che Guevara as some Christ like figure. Its a terrible insult to anyone who lost friends or relatives in Castro's concentration camps at the hands of Guevara. The reviewer who gave it 5 stars should go read a history book.Here are some actual quotes from the beneficent Che that didn't make the movie:"What we affirm is that we must proceed along the path of liberation even if this costs millions of atomic victims." (Referring to Soviet atomic missiles pointed at the US.)"We must eliminate all newspapers; we cannot make a revolution with free press.""Hatred as an element of the struggle; a relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over and beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to and transforming him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold killing machine. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy."Clearly Che would've made a fine Nazi. What's next Soderbergh? a biopic about the happy art lover Hermann Goering?It's disgraceful not to mention dangerous when violent murderous people are celebrated.

Tcarts76 So this was a decent story, and as someone who will never be caught wearing a Che t-shirt ( and I will NEVER let my child wear one), I thought it was at least a decent portrayal of the man. At least for the time period this movie covers. The acting itself, in my opinion, wasn't stellar. Benicio Del Toro did a good enough job, but not enough to make me say, "wow, amazing." The style of the movie was almost like a documentary which adds to it's understated monotone dullness. In fact, for a movie that's suppose to be illustrating the Marxist Cuban revolution, you would expect to see a bit more compelling action. If this is the best they could do, I think Soderberg should have came up with a new name to release it under.There was some rather distracting scenes, shot in black and white, that were flash forwards of Che, getting ready, and addressing the United Nation. I believe the biggest reason for this was to hide something that casted Che in a negative light in the Revolution scenes. I applaud the fact that they did include a theme that most of the high school and college kids that wander aimlessly wearing this man on a T-shirt probably missed. That is that he was NOT a good military leader. I can't complain in this movie that they didn't portray him realistically because they did (...and I hate everything about the guy). There are scenes that show him given command of rear echelon troops, and continually removed from the frontlines despite his desire to be a "real" revolutionary fighter. In fact his rise was due to a friendship he had with Castro, and the fact that he, as a doctor, filled an important "winning the hearts and minds" of the poor Cuban people role.There was an obvious, yet understated political motivation for this movie especially when it ignores the fact that Castro was supported in some ways by the U.S. and did an immediate betrayal after his successful coup and aligned themselves with the Soviet Union.I have just started watching the second part and have some real problems, but I'll address those when I review part II, but I think it is somewhat telling that there is a big gap in time ( one that would be extremely detrimental to his "heroic" lore) between movies, That I am sure was done for a politically ideological reasons (But not enough to be over the top in a Oliver Stone bonehead way.SO Part 1 gets 5 stars for me. It is rather dry, boring, but does stick to some of the facts, and isn't an overboard Hollywood propaganda piece for the Marxist crowd.

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.

barrywilliams993 This is another fatuous fantasy about a Marxist and, worse, a racist that absolutely hated black people.This is indicative of the infatuation of Hollywood elitists who seem not to realize that Che was no hero. He helped install one of the world's most notorious dictators in Cuba and the country has suffered ever sense.I see this as another attempt to portray Che as some sort of liberator and hero. He was neither. He did what he did for his purposes and for La Raza. The unfortunate thing is that no one was freed and there is nothing heroic about Che's pathetic and hate-filled life.Don't bother to slog through this over glorification of the "freedom" fighter who had contempt for those he "freed".