Baader Meinhof Komplex [Baader Meinhof Complex] (2008)

RATING:	80%
FORMAT:	DVD

(Image: http://www.pathe.nl/)

Interesting drama about the inevitable response to state terrorism and state imperialism: Guerilla Terrorism.

The film shows that the best way to defeat terrorism is not to create the need for it in the first place - as well as to understand the mind of violent political activists. They are neither fanatics nor madmen and are quite capable of causing trouble beyond their numbers. To underestimate ones enemy is to allow him too-many easy victories.

Attempts to create a terrorist network reveal that there is more that terrorists have in common than that divides them; making them even more terrorizing than each group would be alone. Despite the feigned surprise of authorities that the terrorists are immoral when the authorities’ own terrorism is not, they still act dumbfounded when the violence they project onto the world comes back to bite them.

The basic argument of this movie is that state-created violence that causes privatised terrorism can be used by governments to control their own populations through the fear it creates among their own peoples. The Frankenstein-like creation of terrorism is thus useful to Western states in terms of population control and in terms of avoiding any political revolutions that could overthrow the powers-that-be: Governments always become more popular with their people when the government is seen as protecting its own people, even when this is false or when only the government is being protected. Thus, each act of state terror produces more terrorism; leading to more state terror and more terrorism – and so on and so forth.

There is not enough understanding of these particular terrorists to make this a sufficiently emotionally- (as opposed to intellectually-) involving story. Privileged Whites rightly decide that their government needs reform, but are not well-organized, nor terribly effective, because they have no real reform program: Just undergraduate and adolescent rage at a rotten and corrupt system. Despite the best efforts of the fine performers here, the characters are not fully fleshed out.

This film compares nicely with Munich in its depiction of internecine violence that leads nowhere but towards more violence. And with Untergang as pretty-solid historical thrillers.

Copyright © 2011 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.