A film for those who remember the last fifty years of world history

Rating: 10/10 (13 March 2013)

This film is a complex and complicated story.
The first thing to say is that the acting is good, very good, contrasting the tense situation, nerve-breaking actually, and the very calm behavior of most of the six hostages and the placid looking behavior of the CIA agent. Not to speak of the tremendous mental tension of most of Iranian people at the airport and the extreme excitation of some in the bazaar and most of the revolutionary guards. That is well done and very effective for us to believe we are in a real situation and not in some James Bond film.
Then the story itself is a very sorry episode of Iranian history, when the Islamic revolution succeeded against the corrupted regime of the Shah who had taken over after the ousting of Mossadegh who had nationalized Iranian oil. The film forgets to insist on the fact the CIA had heavily helped in the coup d'état that ousted the elected Prime Minister. That would have shown how there was a time before 1975 and another after 1975. Before 1975 the US played the cop of the world and after the defeat in Vietnam they became more humble, though not that long. Reagan brought the pride out again. That's what is more or less forgotten in the film that pretends to speak of real events.
The film though is quite good at showing the enormous change that started after 1975. In twenty years the world was to be completely transformed. The defeat in Vietnam caused the emergence of strong movements negating imperialism. Iran was one of these though it was hijacked by the hyper fundamentalist clerics of Iranian Islam who imposed a violent revolution with all kinds of coercion against the people who resisted the strict application of Islamic laws, and of course against Americans.
The strangest evolution was still to come yet since all those who stuck to a non-market economy were to fall down the historical chute, the flushing chute. The Soviet Union and all their Eastern European block were the first victims and they just fell into the free market economy with a great splash in the world's attentive tension. China felt the trend and changed their policy at the end of the 1970s and we know what happened next. The world was to be completely restructured and economic power was to be completely reshuffled and redistributed.
That's in these transitory years of 1979 to 1981 that the hostage crisis in Iran took place. The US embassy was taken over by the revolutionaries and the American personnel was taken hostage, but six had escaped and found refuge at the Canadian Ambassador's residence. The film concerns these six who were in great danger. They were retrieved by a CIA agent sent there as a film producer with the complicity and help of some Hollywood people. That's another change taking place in the USA this time: Americans were ready to serve, even if it was not exactly very good for their public images. Hollywood was on the patriotic side after having been widely against the Vietnam war.
That's what I like in this period and in this film. You feel the world is tilting in a different direction though the film does not explain which one since the past is not examined and the future is not even hinted at. But we feel more than perfectly that in-between spirit and atmosphere. The Americans are on the run but they are no longer defeated. They are pulling back in order to revamp their forces. But fear is their basic emotion and that too is a good thing about this period. Fear had changed sides and the USA have had to reconquer their stamina and to try to start getting rid of their arrogance and absolute certainty to be right above all others.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU