Battle of Algiers

For this post I have chosen to read the review from the Washington Post about the Battle of Algiers by Ann Hornaday. I pretty much agree with a lot of the stuff that she is saying about the movie, the biggest being that there were no heroes in this movie. She writes about how,

"The escalating skirmishes and attacks seem to culminate not in victory but in a far more deflating sense of inevitability."

This is exactly how I felt after seeing the movie, while at first you feel like Ali is going to be the main character and that we are going to follow him throughout the movie, it turns into many different characters with no one side really being shown as heroic. This is done by showing the planting of bombs by both sides, instead of just he French or Algerians. The movie also doesn't try to make one side look like saints and the other look like terrible people, but instead makes them both look like they are doing what needs to be done to save their country.

Another thing that Ann wrote in her review was about how the film looks like,"it is what would today be called a mock-documentary, but there is nothing mock about it" I also agree with this and feel that Pontecorvo did a really good job of using a lot of hand-held shots and black and white picture to make this movie more documentary-like. By having it this way the movie is more believable and you feel like this is actually exactly what happened during that time. I don't think that this movie would be nearly as good without those two aspects.

Overall I enjoyed this film to a certain extent as I feel like it can teach us something about terrorism and look at both sides of the problem. While I felt the movie was boring at times, there were still some good suspense scenes that made it worth seeing.