argrig

It was sad to see Gorbachev so old and incapable of producing anything but a few simplistic sentences on camera. It makes me wonder if that was even necessary to include any footage of an old sick man and whether it adds anything to the history-recap-101 genre to which this documentary gravitates.

In 90 minutes, It is impossible to present the political lay-of-the-land of the 1980s to establish context for this historical figure. The film intertwines history channel-like snippets of major historical events with trite commentaries of Gorbachev's contemporaries and Herzog himself.

Do we learn anything about Gorbachev beyond the wiki-level factoids? No. Does this film convey that there is another dimension to the person that it tries to explore? Absolutely not. If anything, people and events in this film are presented with almost distracting unidimensionality.

The main value of this film is probably limited to the nostalgic documentary footage that is sprinkled over the meaningless monologues and the lulling senile voice of Werner Herzog that creates an anticipation for something deeper than is being delivered on the screen.

A noticeably low-budget B-movie that is challenging your suspension of disbelief.

It was probably filmed in Ukraine (since it's cheaper, I guess) and all the billboards and labels in "Saratov" are actually not in Russian, which is extremely annoying. (Imagine a movie showing New York, where everything is written in German. The "Russian" guy in one of the scenes can't even pronounce the word "christian" properly). When the characters enter a typical panel-block house in "Saratov", we end up seeing your typical Brooklyn lobby. This series of flukes never ends.

The plot itself is predictable and spread out. The first 20 minutes of the film could easily be conveyed in 2 minutes. The rest of the movie maintains this ratio.