A well made historical movie which mucks up the history.

Rating: 8/10 (8 November 2012)

This is a brilliantly directed movie and I didn't even mind watching Ben Affleck, who is a heck of a better director than an actor. Why 8 stars and not the 10-stars it should have received? Well,had this movie been about a fictitious central Asian country with a nod in the direction of actual events I would have been more comfortable with it. The trouble is that precisely because of the realism and attention to detail meaning the absence of CGI and the portrayal of Iran in 1979/1980 is uncannily accurate to the point of severe creepiness, ( eg All the actors looked exactly like the people involved and all the places look as they looked, right down to having the old Tehran airport look exactly like, well, the old Tehran airport), the danger is the viewer ignorant of the true history will not think to question the historical accuracy. What is true is that 6 American consular staff escaped when the US Embassy was stormed, and the CIA, with the help of the Canadians (and the British, and the kiwis) got them out. However The film exaggerates the CIA involvement, plays down the fact that the Canadians were NOT just babysitting the American diplomats, but risking their lives to help them and instrumental in planning and executing their escape.
Other troubling aspects were the oversimplified narration of pre-Revolution Iran was not very accurate, portraying the Shah as someone who forced westernization on an unwilling conservative shia population who revolted, rather than the (as historians now accept) revolution resulted from alliance between the urban secular Left and the rural Religious Right. Portraying the Iranian revolution as Cleric v Shah plays a little to US stereotyping of Iran and it could have taken 3 seconds to actually explain it properly and get the Shah's name right. The portrayal of "most" Iranians as gun-toting Shia fanatics (Hand me that Chador, Brother! And pass me the machine pistol while you are at it! Allahu Akbar!) was also troubling, though this image was later that was modified by the sense that "OK, "most" Iranians who are not afraid to go outside". Another moan is that it was not the CIA who bought the plane tickets to get the diplomats out, it was Mrs Taylor, the Canuk Ambassador's wife, at significant personal risk. And the British, rather than turn them away, sheltered the Americans and got them to the Canadian embassy because the Embassy of Little Satan was the first place likely to searched for the missing Americans, who could not be passed off as Brits. A further gripe is Affleck, whom I detest as an actor as much as I detest Di Palma as a director. He was OK in this, but, really, would it have been so hard to find a Latino actor to play a CIA operative called Mendez? I gripe because had Affleck not mucked about with history the movie would have been just as good, if not better and, well, true. I am annoyed because it was such a great movie, but fell short of Truth, which let it down. However, the film is worth it for the physical attention to detail, the riveting plot, suspense, intrigue, and dark humor. It is a wonderful, well-made movie by a talented director, whose acting limitations were mitigated because the main character didn't talk much. I found myself riveted and caught up in the story in a way I have not for a very long time at the movies, and I have to conclude historical inaccuracies, such as they are, are not anachronistic. Just American.