If you are a child of the cold war era and remember terrorists when they killed perhaps a dozen victims, rather than thousands (not that any kind of terrorist is good) and if you enjoy films about the subject such as “Der Baader Meinhof Komplex” then you really might want to check this one out.
Very well made three part film that neither glamorizes or exaggerates the subject matter. If you grew up reading SOF in the late 70s and early 80s you definitely read about the guy. And a little bit of gun porn, especially the Beretta M12S which was the preferred SMG of Carlos, and it is a very watchable film. Ironically the preference for the M12S by Carlos and a few other high profile terrorists probably prevented it from being considered as a “good guys” SMG by much of the International law enforcement community that Beretta was trying to pitch it too.
I read that book a long time ago. Is he the one who said Bin Laden was in the next compound over, and they used to watch him in his little prayer type gatherings?
I watched the series on IFC. It reminded me a lot of Che, that is the conspicuous lack of condemnation of his acts was a commentary in itself. Much like Che, it doesn’t delve into hyperbole and histrionics, but in so doing it effectively presents the “cause” these guys had as somehow reasonable and justifiable. It isn’t as patently one-sided as Che, which completely ignored the horrendous atrocities committed by the Communists in Cuba both during and after the Revolution (likely because there wouldn’t be any action in a film about a terrorist if such things were ignored), but it is just expository and I find that a little unsettling.
I haven’t seen Che, but I think this film attempts to simply tell the story without becoming propaganda either for or against. Honestly that is how I prefer films and part of why I like Downfall.
I perfectly capable of figuring out Carlos was a Marxist shitbag who killed people to promote the Palestinian agenda just as I’m perfectly capable of figuring out Hitler was a bad guy.
I bring up Hitler because I hated “Hitler: The Rise of Evil” because they felt compelled to manufacture events and history that never happened so that he wouldn’t be viewed as a victim in his adolescence or seen in any kind of sympathetic light. And I don’t think this is necessary to establish the “bad guy” credentials of Adolf Hitler.
And I don’t think any of the evils of Carlos, or his association with butchering terrorists, was in any way glossed over.
I wouldn’t think you would Steyr, but to somebody less informed (like, say, a college student) who might be likely to see a Marxist/Islamist revolutionary as a “hero of the people” these sorts of films can be a sort of reverse propaganda, Che definitely was.
I agree about Hitler: The Rise of Evil.
I don’t know, I guess I’m overly suspicious about the motives of the film makers.
Either way, both films are worth a view in their entirety. Production values for both were very good and adherence to technical and historical accuracy were also (generally) very good.
You didn’t pee on anything, you brought up a point worth addressing and I replied to it.
I also very much do understand your fear. It is the same reason that for years you couldn’t show footage of Hitler with children or his art work (unless your point was to point out how amateurish it was). People were very concerned with humanizing Hitler because it is scary to think a “person” could do such things and so he needed to be presented as an aberration.
By the same token nobody really wants to see guys like Che, Carlos or the Baader Meinhoff members promoted as anything other than the politically motivated murderers that they were. They are certainly no different than Jared Lee Loughner except they absolutely KNEW what they were doing and killed far more people. As a result nobody wants to see a hero film about such people, but anyone who see’s them as such pretty much identifies themselves as a terrorist sympathizer.
That consideration noted, I’d rather see an honest and fair depiction of people and events for several reasons. First if you exaggerate you run the risk of denial, sort of like how the Holocaust TV series of the 70s resulted in the unintended effect of providing a basis for many Holocaust deniers because it was a fictional portrayal rather than a credible docudrama. And second because I am just so sick of the propaganda I was fed all my life I hate all of it. If you need to slant or spin the facts to make a person a “bad guy” then maybe they don’t qualify. It ends up being just more McCarthyism, which is an ironic term given the legitimacy of his fears today.
I agree. Fact is far more revealing than hyperbole.
It’s worth noting that historically, most of the guys ferreted out by McCarthy were actually Communists and that Soviet agents had in fact basically taken over the State Department. Alger Hiss has long been portrayed a victim by the political left, but he was a Soviet spy, the Venona papers prove it, they also prove that CPUSA was funded and controlled by the Soviets. It’s also worth noting that the HUAC was a creation of the Democrats to uncover closet Nazis.
Which is why I stated McCarthyism is such an ironic term.
And we need no better examples than Klaus Fuchs who while involved with the Manhattan Project gave the bomb to Stalin and the Rosenbergs who set up an organization to provide such information to Stalin.
These acts, especially those of Fuchs, are probably the greatest threat to the security of this country in it’s entire history. The led directly to potentially catastrophic nuclear confrontations like the Cuban Missile Crisis. Additionally if Stalin was forced to develop the bomb on his own, many Eastern European and Asian countries might have escaped half a century of Communist rule.
We might have avoided the Korean War completely. Without the communist third column in the US we could have won the war in Vietnam and seen far fewer casualties.
