The film was made right after Che was executed in Bolivia and his corpse was still fresh when they started writing it. The names and events were largely unknown to the world and Che's own Bolivian diary wasn't published yet. All the screenwriter had to go one were sanitized newspaper clippings.
Francisco Rabal's depiction of Che also suffers from lack of knowledge. While he does a pretty decent job as Che, he's still just a cardboard cut-out of the real thing. His demeanor as Che isn't as schizhophrenic and inconsistent as Omar Sharif's rendition in CHE! (1969), and Rabal radiates with the romanticized version of Che that derives from his mythos and empire of kitcshy posters and t-shirts; not reality.
His troupe is mostly made up of archtypes of guerillas and not the real ones. For instance, a black guerilla COULD be Che's trusty assistant/bodyguard Harry 'Pombo' Villegas. However there are no known ones like Inti, Dario, Moises, Tania, or the like, they don't even name Regis Debray, instead they just call him the 'French Reporter.' One time a guerilla even claims that he served with Che in Guatemala. Che didn't know ANY Cuban Guerillas when he was there during Arbenz's ouster and Che never sent any missions to Guatemala when he was in the service of Cuba. Rather, Che only fought in Zaire (which this movie makes no reference of since it wasn't known at the time) and Bolivia.
Notwithstanding, the Barrientos regime is vilified, as should all Latin American dictatorships, but not in the manner of making them a 2-D pack of wolves. The white rangers are seen as just soldiers but the regime itself is just plain bad and Bolivian regulars are just dumb and incompetent.
Thus far, no satisfactory roles of Che have made it to the screen (with the possible exception of Bernal in Motorcycle Diaries) and sadly no decent biopic has come out about the 20th century's most (in)famous guerilla and in any case just a good old fashioned story about the Third-World's attempt to rip off their colonial shackles.
Francisco Rabal's depiction of Che also suffers from lack of knowledge. While he does a pretty decent job as Che, he's still just a cardboard cut-out of the real thing. His demeanor as Che isn't as schizhophrenic and inconsistent as Omar Sharif's rendition in CHE! (1969), and Rabal radiates with the romanticized version of Che that derives from his mythos and empire of kitcshy posters and t-shirts; not reality.
His troupe is mostly made up of archtypes of guerillas and not the real ones. For instance, a black guerilla COULD be Che's trusty assistant/bodyguard Harry 'Pombo' Villegas. However there are no known ones like Inti, Dario, Moises, Tania, or the like, they don't even name Regis Debray, instead they just call him the 'French Reporter.' One time a guerilla even claims that he served with Che in Guatemala. Che didn't know ANY Cuban Guerillas when he was there during Arbenz's ouster and Che never sent any missions to Guatemala when he was in the service of Cuba. Rather, Che only fought in Zaire (which this movie makes no reference of since it wasn't known at the time) and Bolivia.
Notwithstanding, the Barrientos regime is vilified, as should all Latin American dictatorships, but not in the manner of making them a 2-D pack of wolves. The white rangers are seen as just soldiers but the regime itself is just plain bad and Bolivian regulars are just dumb and incompetent.
Thus far, no satisfactory roles of Che have made it to the screen (with the possible exception of Bernal in Motorcycle Diaries) and sadly no decent biopic has come out about the 20th century's most (in)famous guerilla and in any case just a good old fashioned story about the Third-World's attempt to rip off their colonial shackles.
