The Baader Meinhof Complex (Widescreen Edition)

Beside being very factual the movie can be seen as a warning. RAF had 7 million supporters in West Germany. Domestic terrorism can't exist without support. This is why it is dangerous when a part of the population and politicians flirt with extreme views.

Yes,this was an interesting film.But,yet another one that still focuses on the terrorist dramas,rather than the group itself.The tag of 'Baader-Meinhof' is a misnomer.It really should have been ,'Baader-Eisseln'.I wished the film was told similar to the 1967 film,'Bonnie and Clyde'. This film was lacking the character development,to give the viewer reason to care.Many of the events were glossed over,to cram the film into two and a half hours.Their political objectives were also ,in the background,of this quasi-documentary.This film hits the nail on the head with the fact, that this group of aging 'halbstarkers',were a group of hoppel-de-poppel anarchists.The german version of the Manson family.Where eveything was peace and love,in the beginning.The ringleaders were rounded-up,the bellicose bellwethers locked up.And later,violence to potential defectors hung over the heads ,of the group's leftovers.The remaining radicals were already so alienated from normal society,they had nothing to lose.The irony with the RAF and the Manson family also,is that they were considered political inspired.But really,they both had a very weak understanding society,family and governmental operations.I think if Marx and Engels had met them ,they would have seen them as intellectually inferior people.And Mao and Stalin would have seen them as physically lazy and unattentive to strict principles of true revolutionary warfare.Atheists,communists and anarchists have little regard for the environment and their fellow humans.The moslims have 'Allah' and the christians have 'Jesus'.The RAF had no idols to worship,perhaps later only the Baader-Meinhof martyres. So these kids read a few leftist books,they dabbled in mischief.The film gives an entertaining tabloid version of the Baader-Meinhof gruppa.But,I think a half hour could have been added showing the transition from a hippi-beatnik tribe into an agitated anti-social maelstrom of chaos.The closing of the film,shows the disgust of the imprisoned urban guerrillas,and their alledged suicides,after learning the outcome of the failed sky-jacking episode.I have seen the real death photos of the Baader-Meinhof crew.It appeared they were murdered,rather than being suicides.Their eyes looked black-circled,from beatings.It may have been self-inflicted,from sleep deprevation.I think the guards were finished with their circus nonsense and trouble-making,day in and day out.The truth may never be fully known.The RAF activities was a sad chapter,in modern German history.The RAF caused more trouble and problems,than had solved for Germany.And such issues as,global warming and chemical pollution,completely ignored by the RAF.The Baader-Meinhof group made their chief mistake by focusing on the bankers and high-lawers.The bankers and state-lawers are instruments of the state-government,controlled by the jews.I don't think the Baader-Meinhof gang had the organisational preserverence to fully change the state government and install a functioning new working leadership.When you see this film,there are some interesting points,yet not very in-depth.I hope to see a film one day,on the subject of 'Baader-Meinhof',that tells the full story.

"The Heroic Revolutionaries" is how this should have been titled, as the film is a non-stop view of the BM killers from their own radical viewpoint, even though the producers and directors say otherwise. So the viewer is greeted from the start with images from the Vietnam War -- but only things that make the USA look bad. Of course, no scenes of North Vietnamese peasants being disembowled by "comrades" for trying to flee the collective, or the Massacre at Hue they carried out (Americans were prosecuted for war-crimes, while Vietnamese generals got medals). No mention of the Communist gulag and prison-state status of the East Bloc, Soviet Union, Red China, etc., whom these misguided radicals all loved so much. Israel is back-handedly slapped and the Palestinians are extolled as virtuous revolutionarys also in the film, which shows none of the barbarism of the Marxist or Islamic cadres. One is left to wonder why Nazi-hating left-wing radicals are so hot to kill Americans and Jews, that they they team up with the worst of the Nazi-inspired Islamo-fanatics. We can likewise contrast the scenes and words about the Shah of Iran, where nothing is mentioned about Khomeini and the Mullocracy Iran has since degenerated into -- and whom the left-wing still has a love-affair with today... or perhaps a severe memory-lapse about how leftists the world over flocked to Iran to kiss Khomeini's feet, just as they did with Ho, and still do with Castro and all the rest of the totalitarians. The young Iranian students today would celebrate if the Shah came back to power, but both Iran and Vietnam are today giant Prison-States, with a history of large massacres of ordinary people having occurred following the removal of American power and influence in those regions... just think of what the Khmer "Reds" did in Cambodia... but you will get my point. Nothing of this is outlined to warn the film viewer, that history already has discredited the BM-gang's avowed reasons.The foundational assumptions about what set off the young self-righteous, misinformed liberals of that period, who later formed the BM gang, and then embraced the World Socialist Revolution were not accurate then, nor today... and in this respect the film-makers clearly position themselves as "revisionist historians" out to justify BM crimes. They expose a shared enthusiasm for the bloody actions of the BM killers, and through lies-of-omission their enthusiasm for the Communist slave-states around the world. One sees this exposure of motivations more openly in a special feature documentary on the DVD. I think a lot of young people who today are brainwashed by the radical-left accusations against America and Israel -- readers of Red Fascist propaganda by writers like Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Moore, etc. -- will eat this up and burn with fury, wishing they too could get guns and behave like an intellectual pistolero, drunk on Marxism instead of whiskey, robbing banks and frightening the peasants. Not that post-war German society was perfect, and yes a lot of old Nazis still lurked around in power. But the BM Reds could have joined with Weisenthal, or other Nazi-hunting, authentic social reform groups. Or they could have simply crossed the border and lived in the socialist paradise, at any point. In fact, most of these "comrades" came from well-off homes and were more comfortable in the universities than in labor-union halls, with the toiling masses of workers. They never did a lick of sweat-raising work in their lives. And that's true of most of the phoney left revolutionaries, to include such head-shooting "heroes" extolled in the film like Che Guevara, who is awfully compared in scenes to Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, as if they were "all the same". No, they weren't. The BM gang could have accomplished something positive had they taken lessons from those two Americans, who did change America for the better. But to do that, they would have to change their reading list, and stop wasting time with Marx, Che, and all the other fanatics.It is nevertheless a gripping film, well acted and produced, though the English sub-titles are difficult to read. But I give it a low rating nevertheless for its false-historical premises. I'd recommend it so long as you know what you are getting into. If not, you might be tempted to stand on your seat and shake your fist with the angry brainwashed German students..."Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi Minh!", etc. How different was that from their parents favorite chant: "Sieg Heil!"? Only in matters of numbers.

I’ve loved this film since I first watched it on Netflix around 2011. Since IFC has the rights to it, you won’t see it unless you pay for yet another streaming service or you can just buy the Blu-ray.The transfer here is near reference quality. Extremely film like and looks fantastic on my LG C8 OLED. This is one of the best films I’ve seen dealing with this early terrorist/anti-imperialist resistance (depending on how you view the world) period along with the excellent French made “Carlos The Jackal.” The cast is comprised of two of the finest German actors around in Gedeck and Bleibtreu and it remains highly entertaining until the third act which just isn’t as engaging as the majority of the film.Sound quality (DTS HD MA) is as good as the picture quality for this sort of movie.Finally I personally don’t buy the official version of events. I’m not going to spoil anything but others who know the story or have seen the film will know what I’m referring to.

This is an excellent film that presents a dramatization of historical events in Germany during the 1960's and 1970's. The story concerns the formation and activities of a radical and militant left-wing group - the Red Army Faction (RAF) - that operated illegally in West Germany, organised along Leninist lines, and sought to destabilise capitalism in that country. The film explores the early aims and objectives of certain key individuals - Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin - showing how, initially, they sought to redress perceived civil wrongs within society. Yet, as their organisation developed, the group escalated into terrorism - carrying out bombings, kidnappings and assassinations. Ultimately the German police capture these individuals, and the movie depicts the lengthy court proceedings and their imprisonment.The film is superbly acted, with standout performances by Moritz Bleibtreu, Martina Gedeck, Johanna Wokalek and Bruno Ganz. It is, in the end, a tale that explores disillusionment with the status quo and how efforts to fight for greater freedom and liberty can become twisted into terror and murder. This is a violent film, yet it makes for compelling viewing - especially knowing that it's based on actual events.This movie is in German, with English subtitles. If you enjoy it, I also recommend  The Lives of Others [DVD] [2006 ]. The Lives of Others [DVD] [2006

I'm old enough to remember the Baader Meinhof terrorist group from the 1970's so bought this film to discover more about the events that took place.This is a well acted film BUT it came across to me as a film designed to promote Left Wing politics. Members of the Baader Meinhoff terrorist group were in reality a vicious and evil bunch of individuals who killed and maimed innocent people to achieve their own perverted political aims and should have been executed for their atrocities. It would have been better if they'd been buried in unmarked graves and forgotten.

This 2008 historical drama concentrates on the what the press called the Baader-Meinhoff Group, which marked the formative and early years [first generation] of the West German far-left militant group the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction, or RAF) from 1967 through to the leaderships demise in 1977.The strength here is that it tries to balance the views of the B-M-G against those of the representatives of the fledgling German state, managing a generally ‘fair’ balance while capturing some of the political differences within the group and highlights the cultural clashes and tensions between the middle class revolutionaries and the people they sought to represent and work with. The downside is that the characters are often portrayed as neurotic and disengaged from the world about them, also it fails to really distinguish the differing ‘generations’ that the B-M-G gave rise too, which intensified the B-M-G internal differences, even though they are mentioned and the failure to discuss the more violent Italian Red Brigades is a massive oversight.The single disc opens to 2 trailers, the main menu offering play, scene selection and bonus [history in the making, on Uli Edel, the score, filmographies, trailer]. Rated 18 with scenes of full frontal nudity from the opening, concepts of free love, violence, profanity [including the much used ‘C’ word] this is bound to enrage some, as is the general subject but remains a ‘must see’ for anyone interested in student unrest and terrorism in the 20th century.

German screenwriter, producer and director Uli Edel`s fifth feature film which he co-wrote with German filmmaker Bern Eichinger, is an adaptation of a book from 1985 by German Journalist Stefan Aust. It premiered in Germany, was shot on locations in Germany, Italy and Morocco and is a Germany-France-Czech Republic co-production which was produced by producer Bernd Eichinger. It tells the story about three children of the Second World War who following the attempted murder of a German student named Rudi Dutschke, the killing of a German student named Benno Ohrnesorg, the execution of Argentine physician and author Che Guevara, the assassination of American pastor and activist Martin Luther King and American attorney and politician Robert F. Kennedy, the escalation of U.S. bombings in Vietnam, the German student movement, the Paris student riots, the Northern Ireland civil rights movements` first civil rights march and the same year as Australian author Germaine Greer published a book about second-wave feminism, founded an organization.Distinctly and precisely directed by German filmmaker Uli Edel, this finely paced and somewhat fictional tale which is narrated from multiple viewpoints, draws an informative and involving portrayal of a German daughter, mother, sister and author named Ulrike Meinhof, a German daughter, mother, sister and trained elementary school teacher named Gudrun Ensslin and a German son, brother and father named Andreas Baader who met each other in the late 1960s, and who due to their common political views regarding imperialism, neo-fascism and authoritarianism started the first generation of the Baader-Meinhof group. While notable for its versatile milieu depictions, reverent cinematography by cinematographer Rainer Klausmann, production design by production designer Bernd Lepel and costume design by costume designer Birgit Missal, this character-driven and narrative-driven story about the history of terrorism in Germany and dehumanization as a result of ideological extremism which recreates a period in time with counterculture and cold-war when the former leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany named Willy Brandt (1913-1992) was president of the Federal Republic of Germany, the eugenistic legislation in Sweden regarding compulsory sterilization was formally abolished and French actress Isabelle Carré was born, depicts some abridged studies of character and contains a timely score by composers Peter Hinderthür and Florian Tessloff.This reflectively conversational, historic and cinematographic reconstruction of real events from the late 2000s which is set mostly in postwar Germany in the late 1960s and 1970s when German students who due to being German citizens were being blamed for the crimes committed by their parents` generation protested against a new emergency legislature in the former capital of West Germany called Bonn and Palestinian leader of the Fatah party Yasser Arafat was elected as chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which chronicles the militant activities of the Red Army Faction and where collectivism surpasses individualism and turns into unjustifiable left-wing extremism whilst ones humanity is abandoned for a perceived greater cause, is impelled and reinforced by its cogent narrative structure, subtle character development, rhythmic continuity, abrupt film editing, multiple perspectives, use of archival footage and reverently credible acting performances by German actor Moritz Bleibtreu and German actresses Martina Gedeck and Johanna Wokalek. A densely political, virtuously demystifying and atmospheric narrative feature.

Very rarely do I watch films with subtitles because as many know the time you read the translation, the film has moved on 20 frames. However, I really wanted to see this as I remembered clearly what tense times were caused by this group of terrorists and others. The film was very factual, the acting and direction excellent and sometimes I wonder where the makers manage to get some of their props from, decades after they have stopped being produced. The film is pretty much non-stop and the screenplay is superb. Nothing to fault this with. Recommended.