Nice picture, but far from "best film" of 2012

Rating: 7/10 (30 March 2013)

The most impressive aspect of Argo is the reconstitution of the 70's era. It deserves an Oscar for "costumes" and "props". And that's about it...
The acting is bad, the use of 70's songs to set the mood is very poorly done. The inaccuracy regarding actual events is enormous... The "added drama and suspense" that directors evoke as "artistic liberty" in this case was ridiculous. SPOILER ALLERT!
When they are all going to the airport aboard a VW minivan, they run into a relatively small crowd who are staging some kind of protest on a street corner. I've encountered similar situations on my travels. What would does my driver do in such cases? What any driver would do (except in Hollywood): he backs up, does a U-turn, takes a different way; simply avoids the crowd. Even the locals do that, it's common sense. What do the characters in the movie do? They drive slowly right into the crowd, in order to get those dramatic shots of people banging on the van's windows... The whole sequence at the airport, with the Revolutionary Guards shooting at a door to open it, then chasing a 747 down the runway (ridiculous!), and only afterward going to the control tower to harass the flight controllers... The film loses the credibility it had built for almost 90 minutes.
Beasts Of The Southern Wild was way better than this; and so was Zero Dark Thirty; and so was "The Life Of Pi"; and so was "Django Unchained".
Sometimes we complain that certain films have been written assuming that the audience are all morons; the fact that the members of the Academy chose "Argo" for best film says something about their level of intelligence...
Mind you, Argo is not a bad film... But it certainly does not deserve the hype and neither the "best film" award.