Argo Analysis

Argo

Directed and Co-Produced by: Ben Affleck

Academy Award for Best Picture, Golden Globe and BAFTA for Best Director and Best Picture.

This film starts with a voice over narrating why the Iranian revolution took place and the brief history of it. Iranian militants storm the US embassy in Tehran in retaliation for US giving shelter to their previous ruler Shah. They take sixty of the embassy staff as hostages, but 6 people manage to escape. Now, a CIA agent goes there and rescues them from there. Though the backdrop seems heavy, it is a simple premise. The CIA agent uses a fake sci-fi movie and changes the identities of those 6 people as Canadians. The agent, Tony Mendez, played by Ben Affleck makes us feel by his performance that the agent knows what he is doing. That is done by the absorptive nature of his performance, he is not explosive even in scenes where there is crisis. This gives us, the audience, a trust in the hero.

The threat in the film is the madness of the militants, by madness I mean that they aren't ready to reason. They might have been wronged in the past, but by the way they take innocents refugees and by the way they chant slogans raises the stakes. The whole movie and the film making aspect in the film was engaging for me, since I'm into film making but I don't know if everyone would've enjoyed it as much as I did. The movie is mostly shot handheld and it works in holding the tension throughout. It has conventional screenplay structuring. I'm not a big fan of the ending but it carried the tension and I was hooked while watching it but it's just that I expected more out of it since I knew it won those many awards.

About the film being overrated for the awards it won, even I felt the same after watching it. I felt this couldn't have been the best movie that came out that year. In my opinion, awards are meant to change the way the industry works and bring in some change all the time. It doesn't mean they have to award low budget indie films all the time, but artistic merit has to be the only criteria while awarding films. This is a well made movie which promises what it set out to do, but it didn't push anything in terms of craft or writing which is why even I agree with it being overrated. I haven't seen the other nominations or the other films that came out that year so I don't know if this was the only good film out of the lot.