Ernesto “Che” Guevara was either the typical Communist war monger who threatened the stability of Latin America or a man so driven to secure the freedom of downtrodden people everywhere that he sacrificed his life in effort to secure it. Or maybe he’s was just destined to be a great t-shirt spokes model, who knows? The truth is probably somewhere in between, except for that whole thing with the t-shirts because he all know that that’s true. But wherever the truth lie, it’s probably not in Steven Soderbergh’s marathon, double-bill treatment to the Argentine revolutionary.

Che is smartly divided between the chronicling of the man’s greatest victory and his final, crushing defeat. Part One follows Guevara (played with typical gravitas by Benicio Del Toro) as he follows Fidel Castro (Demián Bichir) and a small, dedicated group of Cuban revolutionaries back to the Caribbean island to lead an overthrow of dictator Fulgencio Batista. Guevara’s acumens as a battlefield strategist sees him promoted from field medic to military commander, as well as being one of Castro’s top advisors. In Part 2, Guevara abandons his post was head of industry in the Cuban government to fight the good fight in Bolivia, with much more disastrous results.

Between the two, I prefer the second one both story-wise and thematically. Dramatically speaking, a story of a hero’s failure is always more compelling than his successes, and because Guevara put all his chips on spreading the revolution rather than consolidating his power in Cuba, you have to respect him all the more. Part 2 is also where Del Toro’s grit comes into play. He frequently manages to convey Guevara’s sheer force of will in some utterly non-verbal ways. I also enjoyed the contrast between the Guevara that’s struggling in Bolivia and the Guevara being interviewed in Part 1, confident in his message and in his revolution to the point of being cocky.

And that’s probably the reason why I’m a little more critical of Part 1 and its seeming mythologizing of Guevara. The history is more or less accurate in terms of action, but I’m not sure the character of Che is quite right, leaning a little more to the positive and not so much to his more borderline extremist tendencies. Guevara was a complex man, and it would have been nice to see some of that complexity as opposed to the great revolutionary warrior/philosopher. And while we’re being exhaustive in our examining of the man, why not look at his tremendous output as a writer and a scholar, or for that matter, the things that helped form his philosophy? In the end, nearly four and a half hours in a way seems like only scratching the surface.

But in another way, it seriously feels like Che could have done with some prodigious editing. I found the first film kind of dragged, while maybe about half of the second suffered the same affliction. I don’t need to see every victory and political manoeuvre to get what made Che, Che. Other then that though, the film is a flawless technical achievement. The cinematography is crisp, the shots are well composed and the action is staged with startling realism without any over the top gore or violence. At the end of Part 2, I think Soderbergh goes a little overboard with Guevara’s point-of-view execution, but most of the rest of the film plays things pretty close to brilliance in terms of storytelling devices. Love him or hate him, I think this fact above all else remains: Che’s got style.