Che: Part Two (2008)

Steven Soderbergh's second installment follows Ernesto Guevara into the Bolivian highlands, where the revolution refuses to catch. The film is a procedural in fatigues: supply lines, radio codes, ambushes, the slow attrition of a man and his small column. There is no score to speak of, no montage grandstanding, and no interest in telling us how to feel about any of it. The patient viewer is rewarded with texture, and the impatient viewer is rewarded with a nap.

The political content is unambiguous and also uninterested in making a case. Guevara is a communist insurgent fighting imperial and capitalist machinery, which places a certain amount of class warfare on screen, though as biography instead of sermon. The Bolivian peasants are present as peasants, suffering, unorganized, and largely indifferent to the foreign doctor in their midst. The film notices them without editorializing about identity, which keeps the racial register historical and Cold War shaped, not contemporary. The cast is almost entirely Latin American, and the fact that this registers as unremarkable is the point. Nobody in La Paz stops to explain representation to the audience.

The absences are just as telling. There are no women with interior lives to speak of, no queer characters, no environmental anxieties, no body politics, no neurodivergent framing. Guevara's asthma is a logistical problem, not a metaphor. Soderbergh shows instead of lectures, which in 2008 was already becoming an unfashionable choice and now looks almost eccentric. The result is a war film that trusts its audience and offers them nothing to applaud except the craft. Classification: a period piece of revolutionary history, resistant to the cultural vocabulary of the decade that followed it.

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