Friday, March 1, 2013

Argo Reportedly Sends Viewers into Cardiac Arrest

Ben Affleck’s Argo Will Inundate Your Cardiovascular System


At first, I thought I was watching a Stan Lee comic on screen as the opening included a rather colorful presentation of the history surrounding the Iranian revolution, with actual photos and drawings mimicking the artwork style of a Superman or Batman art strip. It works. It’s a different method of recalling historical information that would engage people ranging from toddlers to grandfathers (not that toddlers should watch a rated R movie anyway).

Argo is a movie about a covert CIA operation to extricate 6 US embassy workers stranded in Iran during the 1979 revolution, in which the Iranian revolutionists stormed the US embassy, creating a hostage crisis. The aforementioned 6 individuals manage to evaporate from the embassy premises, only now needing to be rescued by their fellow countrymen, who decide to enter Iran as a phony film crew.


The movie elevates your pulse rate from the very beginning, starting with the embassy siege. Seeing a handful of Americans trapped in a building with a thousand people engulfing the vicinity, growing restless and more hostile by the minute is enough to create a fountain of piss down one’s pants. Witnessing the indecision among the 6 Americans, whether to leave the building or hope that the walls and windows withstand the invasion, also swells the viewer’s anxiety. To draw a comparison, this is Helms Deep on Earth, grounded in reality where revolutionists use their guns and batons as battering rams against the doors. This was the perfect way to start the movie and the tone of unease and trepidation last consistently till the film’s last minute.

When not busy emptying the viewer’s bladder of bodily fluids, Argo strikes a reverberant echo of sentiment in the most ideal moments. A standout scene was where three locations were simultaneously shown in intermittent transmissions, the public unveiling of the fake movie’s (named Argo) script in Hollywood, an Iranian press conference to declare all American embassy workers spies, and the 6 Americans in their temporary sanctuary watching the news centered on them. They were 3 completely disparate venues yet all bound by the same purpose and meaning. Getting the Hollywood script reading’s dialogue to echo the situation in Iran was ingenious, this strategy magnified by the ideal choice of background music.

Yet, one surprise to me was Alan Arkin. He was nominated for best supporting actor at the Oscars, but appeared only in a handful of scenes. I’m not trying to discredit his role, which was portrayed to good effect in 2 scenes in particular, but more on-screen time would have justified the nomination. On the topic of characters, I felt that there was no great room for any development. And this is strength of the movie rather than a weakness. While Ben Affleck plays the unruffled and purposeful CIA agent with John Goodman and Alan Arkin as the Hollywood aficionados making the fake script, none decided to steal the spotlight. The attention is only on the story, this operation, this great escape set in the Iranian Revolution, and this is an obligation given the magnitude this period of history had. Argo encapsulates this iota of the past profoundly. 



Argo Trailer. 



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