Almost perfect George Smiley book-to-film transition. But who is waiting for another Cold War spying story??

Rating: Null/10 (17 October 2011)

This was the opening film of the Ghent filmfestival 2011. I saw it on the 2nd night, luckily without photo shoots around celebrities walking over the inevitable red carpet. The venue (378 seats) was completely sold out, after promising announcements and positive local TV reports after the 1st night.
The story is based on one of the famous George Smiley books by John le Carré, hence is all about spies in times of the Cold War. The announcement listed a star ensemble of actors. What can go wrong given these prerequisites?? Aforementioned TV reports talking with 1st night attendees had some warning signs already, due to the word "complex" that I heard too many times. I ignored those red flags, however, deeming them no experienced readers of detectives and thrillers like myself. How wrong I was! Throughout the 127 minutes we were bombarded with new characters, appearing out of the blue, most without getting introduced who he was and his role in the story. And while the story unfolded with several unexpected turns of events, we did not get any nearer to some solution or purpose.
Further, with the Cold War over for many years, we cannot feel ourselves involved in spy stories like these. It all seems so silly to us nowadays, knowing how we presently go along with those same countries. We also observe a formidable waste of resources in the form of protocols to restrict knowledge on a "need to know" basis, to protect field workers from exposure. These same protocols were circumvented a few times without many problems, as we saw demonstrated in the film. A little bit of modern surveillance equipment would have obsoleted most of these precautions anyway.
I'm wondering who is waiting for the umpteenth version of Cold War spy stories, without any modernization attempt that transfers them into the changed world of today. The universal concept of a "mole" hidden in your own ranks, is not time bound and offers ample opportunities for such a transition in time, while still keeping the core ingredients of the original story. Outweighing everyone's acting performance with all the missed chances to create a modern version, I gave an "average" mark (3 out of 5) for the public prize competition when leaving the theater.