Whilst the film has many positive elements from performances to cinematography the subject matter just feels far too big for one film. The Baader Meinhof Complex covers too much complicated history and focuses on too many individuals to really work as a single movie. The whole thing lacks cohesion and character development and shifts focus too many times meaning it ends up as a potted history of the group rather than a compelling study of the people at the heart of the Red Army Faction.

This could have been a stunning mini-series but trying to cover all its bases in only two and half hours was a huge mistake. Even Olivier Assayas’ Carlos suffered from this problem but that was…

This is a bit of an odd beast.

It is a historical thriller that wants to give an objective representation of the historical occurrences around the Baader Meinhoff complex, yet also cast it in the mold of a stylized and tense thriller. And while it only partially succeeds in the first aspect, it more than succeeds in the latter.

If you're looking for an exploration of the motivations of this group of terrorists, look elsewhere. This film doesn't concern itself with that, they almost seem afraid to touch upon the deeper reasonings. They furthermore tend to glorify the lifestyle of the two protagonists a bit too much, slightly favouring them in their objective account. What we do get is a…

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Bonus film #32 in my March Around The World | 2017 Challenge (Germany)
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This film from German writer-director Uli Edel was based upon Stefan Aust's 1985 non-fiction best-seller of the same name. Telling the story of a West German far-left militant group known as the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction or RAF) from 1967 to 1977, it was nominated for prizes in the Best Foreign Language Film categories of the BAFTAs, the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards.

The opening scene shows a nude beach, where 39-year-old German journalist and author Klaus-Rainer Röhl (Hans Werner Meyer) is vacationing with his wife Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck) and their adolescent twin daughters, Regine and Bettina. Röhl is the publisher…

2nd Letterboxd Festival - Film 7
Part of the No Rewatch November project.

If I was supposed to sympathize with any of the characters in this film, then I am definitely not the target audience for 'The Baader Meinhof Complex' since the only guy I cared for was Bruno Ganz's Horst Herold. He seemed to be the only individual in the whole film that used his brain.

If I was supposed to be interested in the complex reasons behind the creation, operation and implications of the RAF, then the movie failed me. Everything happened so fast, without even a split second to let either me or the characters to breathe and reflect on what was happening. The focus of the…

When I found out this was going to be in the Letterboxd Festival, I was so excited! I saw it years ago for my European Cinema class in college and fell in love with it from the opening scene. This time, I was a little less enthralled, but I still enjoyed it. It's a heavy film that tends to overwhelm the audience with detail, but the details are so interesting I didn't care most of the time. I feel like the first half is much more compelling than the second half, when the narrative shifts pretty abruptly from the birth of a movement to its decline. I'm not sure both sides of the story needed equal attention, but I can't…

Project WATFIO - #14 of 176

'The Baader Meinhof Complex' is about as close as German cinema has got to fully emulating Hollywood, and the film carries both the positives and negatives that such a stature can bring. With a bumper all-star German cast, representing almost every major film to come out of the nation in the past decade - from 'Lola Rennt' (Moritz Bleibtreu) to 'Das Leben der Anderen' (Martina Gedeck) - 'Baader Meinhof' appears a lot more promising on paper than its realisation demonstrates.

Despite my education and interest in German and Germany, I was totally ignorant of this film's story, and so I can obviously not comment on how biased or truthful this film is in its…

I'm going to preface this review by saying purely as a thriller/revolutionary journey the film functions well enough to be enjoyable. That being said I come at this film from biases that can't be overcome, of those include the fact that my father was stationed at an airbase when it was bombed by the Red Army Faction. This is a story that could very easily have been incredibly personal for me. That being said this film does an incredible disservice to society by telling a story that in any way shape or form glorifies these people.

*rant begins here*

Members of the RAF were violence driven psychopaths and essentially nothing more. That or they were just incredibly stupid. We have…

I purchased a bunch of DVDs during my recent trip to Germany. These days, I seldom get a chance to watch movies made in my home country in my native language, and they do actually have a considerable and not at all unimpressive film industry there. So you’ll perhaps notice a pattern among my reviews for the next few weeks or so. One of Germany’s lesser known nominees for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar during the enormously prolific 2000s (two wins and four additional nomination in eight years), “The Baader Meinhof Complex” tackles the incendiary rise of far-left extremism in West Germany during the late 1960s, triggered by the increasingly brutal war fought by the “American Imperialists” in Vietnam.…