What are we supposed to think

Rating: 2/10 (29 January 2016)

*** First review so maybe I got some spoilers in here*** I went into this with high hopes and excitement after the positive reviews. Once I started getting into the story the film was trying to tell, I began getting the palpable sense that Spielberg & company were making this spy for the communist regimes into a sympathetic guy (while at the same time making the same amount of effort in reverse to make all the Germans and Americans - except for our intrepid hero Tom Hanks, of course, look like idiots). My question throughout the movie as it progressed was, Why? Why exactly was I supposed to like and sympathize with this spy? And I never got it: He served and was loyal to a brutal, oppressive regime, the USSR. Reading up on him after to see if I'd maybe missed something, I simply found out that he was one obviously was at odds with our American /Western values and our country at that time, and in his very profession and actions doing his part to undermine America by bringing her secrets to our enemy. Spielberg seems to go out of his way to make him seem so nice and relate-able. But that running gag line about "Would/will it help?" got tired real fast - after the second time he uttered it. On the other hand, he invests the same effort at making the (East) Germans loathsome. But weren't they along with Abel serving the same overlord, the USSR? I never bought it that Abel was in the remotest sense likable or even misunderstood. He was in real life a communist ideologue and stooge of a corrupt oppressive system under Stalin that had murdered or starved to death tens of millions - yes, TENS of millions of their own people or those of Soviet satellite republics. This then isn't movie-making so much as Hollywood revisionism. The two stars all go to Tom Hanks.