It's hard for me to comprehend the majority of praise this documentary has received. Yes it is different and at times uncomfortable to watch, but that doesn't mean it's great or even good.
For a film that is about actual political murders detailed by the murderers themselves, you wouldn't think it could be boring, but it was. I could barely get through the first 30 minutes and it never compelled my interest - I had to force myself to keep watching it. When you have a bunch of ignorant and ill-informed men self psycho-analyzing, using incorrect culture references and base human non-emotion to smugly explain or rationalize how and why they killed, and then to reenact the interrogations and murders in a cheapo Bollywood style, well it's ludicrous, not revolutionary. I mean if the message is that even morons can kill and in time film cheesy reenactments about it, then I guess I understood the message and then I asked, so what did that prove? The end scene, where one of the killers becomes ill for an extended period of time, might be looked at as redemptive, but even if perceived in that way it's out of place, message-wise, with the rest of the film.
From the reviews I read I thought there were going to be elaborate and amazingly bizarre and unique recreations of various crimes against humanity and from that I might learn something about the most terrible crimes against humanity. But the film's scope is not that historically vast and only a couple scenes have elaborately stylized the atrocities. Generally the recreations are mostly small scale, cheesy and repetitive. What is almost more distasteful than the actual historical killings themselves is the filmmaker's concept, asking the killers to recreate their crimes with such callous disrespect to the lives taken. Yes it may have been therapeutic for the participants (as if killers deserve therapy?) and all this is supposed to pass for brilliance? Brent Chastain - Top3Films.com
For a film that is about actual political murders detailed by the murderers themselves, you wouldn't think it could be boring, but it was. I could barely get through the first 30 minutes and it never compelled my interest - I had to force myself to keep watching it. When you have a bunch of ignorant and ill-informed men self psycho-analyzing, using incorrect culture references and base human non-emotion to smugly explain or rationalize how and why they killed, and then to reenact the interrogations and murders in a cheapo Bollywood style, well it's ludicrous, not revolutionary. I mean if the message is that even morons can kill and in time film cheesy reenactments about it, then I guess I understood the message and then I asked, so what did that prove? The end scene, where one of the killers becomes ill for an extended period of time, might be looked at as redemptive, but even if perceived in that way it's out of place, message-wise, with the rest of the film.
From the reviews I read I thought there were going to be elaborate and amazingly bizarre and unique recreations of various crimes against humanity and from that I might learn something about the most terrible crimes against humanity. But the film's scope is not that historically vast and only a couple scenes have elaborately stylized the atrocities. Generally the recreations are mostly small scale, cheesy and repetitive. What is almost more distasteful than the actual historical killings themselves is the filmmaker's concept, asking the killers to recreate their crimes with such callous disrespect to the lives taken. Yes it may have been therapeutic for the participants (as if killers deserve therapy?) and all this is supposed to pass for brilliance? Brent Chastain - Top3Films.com