Black Box BRD

This documentary has some interesting contents but it doesn't quite know what it wants to be. The end credits show that there was a dramaturgical consultant who obviously told the filmmakers to include pop music at some points of the movie, but who didn't succeed in helping them to make a point on the material they had shot.

The film investigates the lives of two men who were both killed: Alfred Herrhausen was assassinated by the Red Army Faction in 1989, and Wolfgang Grams, an RAF member himself, died at a police operation in 1993. Grams might or might not have been involved in Herrhausen's death; that's the only interface between them. In the movie, which consists exclusively of archive footage and interviews and which does not use an off-voice commentator at all, it never becomes clear why the filmmakers didn't make two separate films, or why they chose precisely these two people for their documentary.

The two lives did not have much in common, but each taken on its own, they were interesting. The movie is most amazing whenever people tell about certain crucial events in Grams's or Herrhausen's lives. In between, I felt its length to too large an extent.