Like all early and peak Oliver Stone, Salvador (1986) is an unrelenting bundle of aesthetic pizzazz and energy. The bloke made movies on Steroids back in the day, his style and signature undeniable.
This is supreme storytelling, but if you take a mere cursory skim over the real-life events, and especially the narratives of Richard Boyle and John Hoagland, this is total bullshit.
So, it’s an Oliver Stone movie.
Never let facts get in the way of your politics, eh.
It’s entirely and totally unnecessary, and the only explanation I can find for it is that it’s a relatively inexperienced director without the confidence to let his characters demonstrate what he’s trying to get across; they even do this without the voice-over.
It’s the single most pointless use of a character’s narration ever, yet the film succeeds despite of it. That’s the sign of a great movie.
And what the hell happened to Tom Berenger? He should have graduated to the status of a menacing Paul Newman, or at least a top-drawer character actor. But he didn’t.
Beguiling.
The wee exposition and the build up are awarded a wee semi-kudos, as is the stark style throughout. It was also one of the last motion pictures with the existence of a telephoto lens. It does feel too much like an Oliver Stone movie, which doesn’t say much about the film’s hack director.
It’s well shot. That’s all I can compliment it with.
The utter stupidity and narcissism of the smuggling Billy Hayes vexed me even down to his semi-mullet, which even got to the stage of him jerking off to an ex through a glass window. The needlessly sensational violent scenes (one with Hayes spitting out a tongue of a guard he’s just jousted) were even more out of place.
The appearance of the father only intensified my dislike of this rubbish movie, the constant hatred of Turkey, and even from this bloke, who appears at first to be an avuncular sort; there is a scene in which he even slags off the locale cuisine.
It was only good when it avoids the very disconcerting politics. Stone has always been a beguiling one, an alleged left-winger/liberal with a predilection for casual racism and a fawning thing for dictators. This is one of his worst contributions to human history.
The funniest bit of this atrocious movie was the ending, when he even can’t walk away from a prison properly. At the appearance of a military car he slumps his shoulders back like an outcast goblin in a cathedral.
Horrid film. Absolute crap.
I’ve been on quite the Oliver Stone binge of late and it was inevitable that I arrived at a certain disaster. This is a complete train wreck of celluloid.
The accents are all over the place, for some unfathomable reason Macedonians from antiquity possessing Irish, Scottish, and Russian dialects. And dreadful ones at that.
The film is rammed, at the expense of drama and thrills, with pointless tactical information about the battles on display. In the nauseatingly constructed Battle of Gaugamela, Stone keeps cutting to an eagle surveying the scene. It’s a mad decision and I recall half the cinema howling at the time. There’s another bit with Alexander taking on an elephant and it is hilarious. The film apparently has like 18,000 different ‘Director’s Cuts’. They will all be shite, I guarantee you.
A nuts and utterly unwatchable motion picture. How can you make one of the greatest military commanders and statesmen in history so irrevocably boring? This movie achieves that impossible feat.
You honestly need to see it to believe it.
The Kennedy ‘Camelot’ worship is just pathetic, a whitewashing of some truly horrific folks. I just don’t get it and the only explanation I have for the adulation of that pampered clan is that when you’ve got Nixon or Goldwater you have to pick the lesser of two … something like that. Anyway, the outright lies in this movie are audacious in their temerity. The director quite literally makes shit up. No wonder the amenable masses think everything is a conspiracy these days.
But what a cast, what style, what editing razzmatazz. If you could define bravura it would be peak Oliver Stone. He’s the best kind of worst propagandist. What does the lad get up to these days aside from interview dictators? His last masterwork was Any Given Sunday (1999). I saw a film he made about Alexander the Great. It was worse than one of my shites after tanning a vindaloo.
“Back, and to the left. Back, and to the left. Back, and to the left.”
When someone says the 1980s to me this is the visual I conjure: corporate raider Gordon Gekko just chilling on his wee private beach, making plans at dawn to change the world with Bud Fox. Those were the days when the mobile phone could be utilised as a weapon. I need this in my life.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 