Network: Sundance Channel
Who Is In It? Edgar Ramirez, Nora von Waldstätten, Alexander Scheer, Julia Hummer
Sundance’s first scripted miniseries looks at the life of one of the world’s most famous leftist guerrillas, Venezuelan born Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal. Divided into three parts, the film covers some 20 years from his rise as a revolutionary leader in the early 1970s to his arrest in 1994. Star Edgar Ramirez moves effortlessly through dialogue in English, French, Spanish and German in a film whose scope spans three continents. The film reveals different sides of Carlos — the ambitious young Marxist as deadly with weapons as he was with women, the calculating leader who orchestrated the audacious kidnapping of OPEC ministers from a meeting at their headquarters in Vienna, and the older terrorist whose usefulness to the countries that supported his actions ended with détente. An occasional news broadcast from the era adds a dose of reality to the frequently intense drama, reminding viewers of the horror of the attacks Carlos and his group carried out. But at the end of this five-and-a-half-hour film, Carlos remains a puzzle. Perhaps if director Olivier Assayas had been less obsessed with the minutiae of how Carlos planned his attacks and had spent some time looking at Carlos’ early life, he might have provided more insight into what turned a young idealist into a deadly terrorist.
