We believe that you are familiar with the information that this film is an Oscar winner in the category of best film. However, as there are quite conflicting opinions about this film, it is hard to shake off the impression that this award for this film is undeserved, especially considering this year’s competition in the same category. Let’s not offend those who really liked this film, we actually liked it, but Argo, despite the abundance of tense scenes, is essentially a completely average thriller.
By a similar principle, Argo gained in popularity. Propaganda took the initial step, and the contagion immediately spread among the people and it simply became popular to say that Argo is a great movie. It’s kind of like when teenagers say they like certain music, which they don’t really have a clue about, in order to get some points from their peers or their sympathies. But, aside from the criticism, let’s start with a more detailed analysis in order to discover those brighter sides of this film, which would eventually justify its title of “best film of the year”.
As we mentioned in the introduction, Argo is a really tense thriller and if it weren’t for the political background of the story, it would pretend to be a really valuable achievement. The film starts extremely boring and just before giving up further viewing, things start to get more interesting. As the story goes on, you begin to realize that this, though relatively predictable, is quite a decent thriller, and your resistance you may have had to this film, depending on the amount of your ego, slowly begins to subside. The music in the film is very satisfying, but a bit fragmented, more precisely, the songs that accompany certain scenes are very short, and the power of those scenes quickly wears off.
The depiction of the period in which the film takes place (1979/80) is truly faithful and authentic. Maybe someone wouldn’t even pay attention to that, considering that it is about the recent past, but we believe that it is harder to achieve the authenticity of the period from a few decades ago, than, for example. from the 16th century, due to the fact that there are living witnesses of that time, you have to pay attention to more details and mistakes are easier to steal. On the other hand, another plus for Argo. Watching the film, from the acting point of view, the team is mostly up to the task. The actors are famous (Alan Arkin, John Goodman) and mostly know their craft well, even when it comes to Ben Affleck, although his acting abilities are often underestimated for some reason. Again, we can’t say that anyone stood out in this field, and maybe there wasn’t much room for that. There are a lot of characters in the film, and it seems that some of the characters are not elaborated enough because there was simply not enough space to expand their characters.
Given that Argo is based on a true event, we can’t even fathom what all the facts in this film are perverted. Of course, films inspired by real events naturally add or subtract from the truth, in order to make the story more interesting, but in films with a political theme, it gains more weight than in other cases.
Watching Argo, we had the impression as if we were watching some intellectual version of Rambo, actually a more realistic, but basically very similar story. As much as he tried to disguise himself, admit it, doesn’t he sound just like Rambo? Joke aside, we loved Rambo after all, didn’t we?
