Wildly Entertaining. Incredibly Tense. Fiercely Exciting.

Rating: Null/10 (8 October 2013)

Winner of 3 Academy Awards including Best Picture, Argo is Ben Affleck's finest work as a director, is one of the best films of its year & is quite an accomplished piece of storytelling that expertly recounts the real-life event that took place in Iran during the Iranian Revolution in which 6 US diplomats were rescued by CIA with the help of Canadian government.
Set in 1979 Iran, the story of Argo follows 6 US diplomats who go into hiding when Iranian revolutionaries invade the American embassy in Tehran, taking several of them hostages. In an effort to get its people out of the country, CIA goes through various options & eventually settles with an insane plan; to arrive in Iran for scouting locations of a fake Canadian film & smuggle its people as part of the production crew.
Directed by Ben Affleck, the best thing about Argo is the way it builds up its plot & manages to keep the tension alive throughout its runtime. Affleck shows massive improvement in his work behind the camera for he methodically elevates the anxiety that culminates with a nail- biting finale & in the process, adds another quality feature to his résumé as a filmmaker. But there are also many elements in the film worth complaining about.
The story takes a great amount of artistic license with the true event, completely downplays the role other nations played in making the then-covert operation a success, makes use of few inaccuracies for dramatic purposes & while these elements did provide a more thrilling cinematic experience, the absence of subtitles when any Iranian is on the screen but the presence of one when an American is speaking the same language is plainly insulting.
Coming to the technical aspects, production design aims for the 80s aesthetic & gets much of it right. Cinematography encapsulates the whole narrative with a foreboding atmosphere that never dissipates. Editing keeps the plot tightly-gripped at all moments & there isn't any moment in the picture that feels irrelevant to the plot. And last but not the least, Alexandre Desplat chips in with a soundtrack that makes the experience all the more brutal & restless.
As far as performances go, Argo features a dependable cast in Ben Affleck, John Goodman, Alan Arkin, Bryan Cranston & others. Although none of the characters are fleshed out that well, the work by Affleck, Arkin & Goodman still lifts the film up by a few points. The actors playing the US diplomats also do a fine job in their given roles & in the end, the sum of the inputs put in by its entire cast manages to do a better job than any individual contribution.
On an overall scale, Argo may have a few shortcomings in the narrative plus its retelling of the "Canadian Caper" leaves out much of what actually happened but simply as a thriller, it just works. It manages to sustain its uneasy ambiance for 2 hours, effortlessly succeeds in keeping its audience at the edge of their seats and is an incredibly tense, fiercely exciting & wildly entertaining ride which in the end feels worthy of all the accolades it has garnered so far.