The Motorcycle Diaries (Widescreen Edition) | 
| Director: Walter Salles
Actors: Gael Garcia Bernal, Rodrigo De La Serna, Mercedes Moran, Jean Pierre Noher, Lucas Oro
Studio: Universal Studios
List Price: $14.98
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Rating:  259 reviews
Sales Rank: 1603
Format: Ac-3, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, Subtitled, Widescreen, Ntsc
Languages: English (Subtitled), French (Subtitled), Quechua (Original Language), Spanish (Original Language), French (Dubbed)
Rating: R (Restricted)
Region: 1
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Number Of Items: 1
Running Time: 127 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 5.4 x 0.6
ISBN: 1417022043
UPC: 025192594229
EAN: 9781417022045
ASIN: B00005JNCZ
Theatrical Release Date: September 24, 2004
Release Date: February 15, 2005
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The beauty of the South American landscape and of Gael Garcia Bernal (Y Tu Mama Tambien, Bad Education) gives The Motorcycle Diaries a charisma that is decidedly apolitical. But this portrait of the young Che Guevara (later to become a militant revolutionary) is half buddy-movie, half social commentary--and while that may seem an unholy hybrid, under the guidance of Brazillian director Walter Salles (Central Station) the movie is quietly passionate. Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna, a lusty and engaging actor) set off from Buenos Aires, hoping to circumnavigate the continent on a leaky motorcycle. They end up travelling more by foot, hitchhiking, and raft, but their experience of the land and the people affects them profoundly. No movie could affect an audience the same way, but The Motorcycle Diaries gives a soulful glimpse of an awakening social conscience, and that's worth experiencing. --Bret Fetzer
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| Customer Reviews: Read 254 more reviews...
 "On the Road" with Che Guevara October 3, 2004
Robert Moore (Chicago, IL USA)
222 out of 245 found this review helpful
As most potential viewers know, this film is based on diaries and letters to home written by Ernesto "Che" Guevara during a motorcycle and foot tour of a significant portion of South America during the early 1950s, years before Guevara achieved international renown as a Communist and Latino revolutionary. Thus, the film functions as an attempt to get at the heart of the person who preceded the myth. The film is therefore difficult to judge as pure cinema. Is this, on its own merits, a great film? Or is it a great film about Che Guevara? Interestingly, the person I saw this film with knew absolutely nothing about the subject of the film before it started, and did not connect Ernesto Guevara with Che Guevara until very late in the film. Her reaction was interesting. Until she realized that it was about Che, she says that she considered it a decent but only slightly above average "road" picture, but it gained considerably in her estimation once she realized who the film was about. I think she was correct, and I would agree with those who feel that what merits the film has depends to some degree on who the film is about. If Ernesto hadn't become Che, it would be a good film but of considerably less interest than it is.
The film does a good job of rooting Che's eventual concern with the liberation of the oppressed by depicting his broad and constant encounters with everyday people throughout the continent. Camus wrote that it was important to side with the victims and not the executioners, and in his travels Ernesto spends most of his time with the victims. His near-epic exposure to the continent clearly condition his sympathies and inform his vision. At the end of the film it is easy to understand why Che chose a life dedicated to aiding the oppressed in Cuba and elsewhere. The great question left unanswered, and the one reason one can find Che's life morally troubling, is why he felt that the causes he espoused demanded a violent, military response. Why follow in the steps of Trotsky and Lenin rather than Gandhi? Apart from a single line which merely hints that Che felt violence might be necessary, the film doesn't come anywhere close to answering this question.
In many ways, the star of the film is the South American continent. I have seen many films over the years set in one corner of the continent or another, but none provided a panoramic view. This film, however, by swinging through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Columbia, and Venezuela provides a graphic impression of the continent's immense geographical diversity, expanse, and enormous beautiful. I don't think it would be possible to see this film without a deep urge to visit the land. The scene shot in Machu Picchu reveals the incredible beauty of the site better than anything else I have ever seen.
Gael Garcia Bernal is a remarkably handsome, talented young actor, formerly best known for one of the two young men in Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN, and is outstanding in portraying the young Che Guevara. One suspects that his days as an actor in primarily Latin productions is close to an end, his next several projects originating in Hollywood. Rodrigo De la Serna does not have the enormous charisma of Bernal, but he more than holds his own in the film. The cast is rounded out by a large roster of professional and amateur performers.
Che Guevara is such a controversial figure that this film could elicit a host of differing responses. How one will respond to this film will be deeply conditioned by how one views him. But I do think that it is a film that virtually every viewer will respond to with great interest, and I defy anyone not to find the remarkable landscapes anything short of stunning.
A YOUTHFUL, ROMANTIC VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY. TAKE IT AS SUCH October 27, 2004
Shashank Tripathi (Gadabout)
51 out of 66 found this review helpful
I don't get some of the ranting reviews here that claim this movie has communist contours; there's as much radicalism in this film as there is Oriental Buddhism in Jackie Chan kungfu capers.
I never felt that the movie couches any fiery or didactic political message, or that it even ought to.
It's a romantic ode to the youthful Guevara, and truly captures the adventurism and empathy of his formative years that may have affected him in later life. The director is wise not to weigh his narrative down with too many explicit allusions to his eventual activist zeal.
Whatever it's political underpinnings, at least it's a gorgeous looking picture, a trekker's fantasy that catalogs the ramshackle journey of a couple of young men who hailed from good stock, but gave all that up to set off on a rinkydink motorcycle to see places they'd only read about and meet people they'd never imagined.
It is difficult not to fall in love with the stunning imagery that pervades the film, as we watch a neorealistic camera cut a vast Latin American skein from the snow-covered Andes, to the mysterious ruins of Machu Picchu, to a sprawling Chilean desert and a Peruvian river that the young Guevara swims across in the film's climax -- all physical destinations to be reached and crossed as well as stages in our protagonist's spiritual and psychological growth.
Some traces of ham-handedness may be evident in the latter half, when Guevara speaks with a homeless person or a coarse day labor manager or an ostracized leper. But Bernal does a fabulous job of maintaining a perfect dose of traveler's passivity coupled with boyish inquisitiveness.
Thinking back, the movie could also have thrown in some measure of a conclusive message into the fray, but the guitar strumming that serves as a backdrop to the closing credits simply overtakes that thought in my mind. I'm off to buy the soundtrack as soon as I am done with this review.
I highly recommend it for the discerning viewer. Won't be surprised if this gets in line for those nude male statuettes.
Brilliant acting, breathtaking landscapes & music, touching May 4, 2005
Manny Hernandez (Palo Alto, CA)
48 out of 67 found this review helpful
This is a road movie about Ernesto "Che" Guevara, before his "political" times. Actually, it is fair to say that it depicts in a romantic way the road trip through the heart of South America that opened him up to the things to come later. He embarks on a 10K+ KM journey with his buddy Alberto Granado, riding "La Poderosa" (The Powerful One), an oil-leaking motorcycle, going from Argentina to Venezuela, through Chile, Peru and Colombia.
The performance by Gael Garcia Bernal, once more, does not dissapoint, turning him into one of the most versatile (yet controversial) actors of this generation. The music by Gustavo Santaolalla is breathtaking, becoming a perfect match for the monumental South American landscapes (think Andes, Amazon river...). The movie as a whole leaves you feeling good in the end. Highly recommendable.
 A Myopic Look at an Iconic Figure November 27, 2005
B. Merritt (WWW.FILMREVIEWSTEW.COM, Pacific Grove, California United States)
33 out of 39 found this review helpful
This is a tough review to write because of the subject matter we're dealing with: a militant revolutionary who became Castro's right-hand man during the 1959 Cuban revolt. But here in THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES film, we don't see this man; we see instead the formation of the person whom this man (Ernesto "Che" Guevara played by the talented Gael Garcia Bernal)would become. He's a young idealist living in South America when he and a friend (Alberto Granado played by up-and-coming actor Rodrigo de la Serna) decide to take a road trip across the continent before bellying down into their chosen carriers in medicine.
The film succeeds in giving us a very myopic view of these two men: Guevara for the initial changes he begins to go through as he witnesses injustices to the low and poor; Granado for his love of women and grudging dedication to Guevara. We travel with them on a 1939 Norton 500 motorcycle (my hat's off to the two actors who had to ACTUALLY learn to ride one of these behemoths!) as they argue with each other over money, their deficient form of transportation, and Guevara's unflinching honesty when asked delicate questions (this is brought into focus when they first meet a man - who looks very German - in a small village and asks Che and Granado to look at a lump on his neck, which Granado diagnoses as a cyst but Che calls a tumor).
The cinematography was done exceptionally well on a small budget. The beauty of Machu Picchu, the green forests of Peru, the nothingness of various deserts, all added great visuals for the viewer.
The film's faults lay with its omissions. Yes, Che was a thinking man. Yes, Che was concerned with humanity as a whole. But Che was also somewhat of a bigot. He didn't like blacks, jews, and homosexuals (read the book THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES). So when he shows his concern for lepers in a colony along the Amazon River, we're only see a part of this complex man. Granted, for a film you need to have your audience empathize with the main character, but this also pulls us into the shallow end of the depths that this man was. The convoluted sections of Che's life might have added an extra level of understanding for film viewers, especially those who have knowledge of his later life when he becomes an executioner of spies and deserters, quite a dichotomy compared to the hippocratic oath he took when becoming a doctor - the oath basically promising to "do no harm."
But, again, I can understand why the film makers decided to omit these sections. We are, after all, seeing only the early life of Che, a fomenting of ideas that would change his life forever. But I think we have to be careful when looking at such a potentially volatile subject and controversial man, and only showing the "sunnier" side of Che to a new generation of movie-goers. More research is needed if one really wishes to understand the levels of Che.
 An Eloquent Whitewash May 26, 2005
M. Lysons (USA)
30 out of 49 found this review helpful
I saw this really cool movie about Charles Manson when he was a boy, riding a bike, helping people he met along the way, volunteering at a leper colony, charming the ladies, flashing that winning smile, etc. The movie may have glossed over his bitter racism and his intense homophobia a bit, and it did go far out of its way to paint Mr. Manson in a positive light (e.g., by adding a completely contrived and fictional "gloves off" scene in a leper colony that never happened). Had you not known the name, you might have thought that he went on to be some kind of heroic figure or great humanitarian...not a mass murderer who enjoyed and savored his victims' pain or a delusional megalomaniac who equated wholesale slaughter with revolution.
Oh, wait, did I say "Manson?" Sorry, I meant "Guevarra." Not that it matters. Different name, same meaning.
The Motorcycle Diaries is about a man who personally oversaw and took pleasure in dozens of mass executions in Cuba and Latin America (and ordered hundreds more). It's about a man who once personally and without trial executed a hungry child for stealing food. About a man who led bands of armed thugs into peaceful, isolated villages and killed any male who refused to join his "revolutionary army." Che founded Cuba's "labor camp" system-the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate and torture (and often execute) [...], political opponents, religious clerics and AIDS victims. He lobbied Khrushchev and Castro to launch a first-strike nuclear attack on the US from Cuba. The "passion" that drove this man was ultimately not a passion for justice, but just a passion for killing. The fact that Che committed all these unspeakable atrocities ostensibly to effect social change is no defense: after all, you could say the same about Charles Manson.
Don't take my word for any of this. You can judge Che from his own hateful words: "To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate."
If that's not enough, how about another Che gem: "Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine - this is what our soldiers must become."
In this age of depravity-worship, it is no surprise that this movie is considered Oscar-worthy. Our impressionable young should take their history lessons from sources other than Hollywood movies.
Thousands of men and women have gone on life-affirming road trips as young men and had madcap misadventures, learning about the world and about themselves in the process. So let's face it: the only thing that sets Che's odyssey apart is that Che subsequently went on to become a "cold-blooded killing machine." Others have taken similar journeys and have gone on to dedicate themselves to ending world hunger or healing the sick. Why not make a movie about them? But instead this movie lionizes a man capable of saying AND LIVING BY Che's hateful words. Should such a man be admired, memorialized in cinema and t-shirts, and held up as a role model for those seeking justice? No more than Charles Manson should.
Save your money and your time and your dignity. Respect the dead. Watch something else.
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