'Guernica' (2016) w/ James D'Arcy and Maria Valverde

Finally got to see this yesterday. Spanish-American film that takes place during the Spanish civil war.

Reviews for this film have been mixed. Almost no English-language critics have reviewed it, but the critic reviews (both English and Spanish) have been positive. Audience reviews, however, have been tearing this film apart. I'm very interested in the subject matter (I'm ethnically Basque), though, so I decided to give it a go.

Story: The film follows Henry (James D'Arcy playing a composite of Ernest Hemingway, Robert Capa, and George Steer) over a few days in April of 1937 in the Spanish Basque Country.

There are two main conflicts: (a) a love triangle between Henry, Teresa (Maria Valverde playing a Republican censor), and Vasyl (Jack Davenport playing the Soviet apparatchik running the censor office in Bilbao) and (b) the war, culminating in the bombing of Gernika during the climax of the movie.

Strengths: First, the people who made this movie really cared about telling this story and making a good movie. There's some great models in here, they filmed on location, and the extras are all from the area. Second, they do a good job pointing out that both the Francoists and the Soviets aren't good people. Third, the acting is generally pretty good. Fourth, the story, though a bit basic, is a good one and it gets the job done. Fifth, the whole Gernika sequence is done really, really well. Finally, Maria Valverde is great in this. I'd never heard of her before, but she was brilliant with the exception of one terrible sequence in which everyone was bad (see below).

Weaknesses: First, for whatever reason, they decided to have Henry be an American (even though the guy he's most clearly based on was British) and cast a British guy to play him. D'Arcy does a good job holding an American accent (even though I got a distinct Goldblum vibe), but he loses it in a few scenes. Second, the actress who plays the French reporter is cringeworthy. Third, the whole sequence from city hall through the love scene is just bad. Every single part of it is terrible. Fourth, some of the editing is a bit jerky, and some of it doesn't make much sense (for example, there's a part where a German guy starts speaking and we never here the end of it). Fifth, the captions before and after the film are pretty terrible. Finally, the film doesn't do a great job of showing why Gernika was so important. They do a good job showing that the bombing was horrible, but they don't do a good job explaining that the town was entirely a civilian target, that it was tiny as frick, and that it was (and is) the symbolic capital of the Basques (they actually start to explain the latter by talking about the Tree, but then they cut away).

Conclusion: Despite its flaws, this is a movie worth seeing.