Argo

Most successful spy films usually develop around impossible missions, conducted with the most spectacular resources ever seen and with glamorous fighters capable of defeating a small army with their own hands as main characters. The actual espionage, I believe, cannot be like that.

Argo shows us espionage as it is (or at least as it was in the late seventies), telling a story that became known only when the secret material of the operation was declassified by the U.S. government. The CIA agent Tony Mendez entered Iran in 1980 to rescue six diplomats who had escaped the takeover of the U.S. embassy by the forces that governed the country and who were able to refugee, in secret, in the Canadian ambassador's house.

Menez is the man that ultimately proposes "the best bad idea" to get the hostages out of the country: pretending that they were part of a production team of a science fiction film scouting locations. This crazy idea will allow us to embrace what is yet to come: a thriller made with earthly emotions, where situations are simpler but also more plausible; so that our attention is caught even without big shootings or somersaults and we are made to feel the uncertainty over whether these people are going to get out safely or not (altough of course, historically, we already know)

A good call for Argo is to use pictures and animations (an aesthetic way proper of fantasy films) in order to place the viewer in the political context of that time. If you think about it, a movie that puts the audience in the middle of the production of another movie which is only a facade, could only have taken off from a good storyboard, from smart choices, like asking the director of photography to increase the grain of the image to make it look like the political cinema of the seventies.

The real spies are those guys who disguise themselves as ordinary people to get their way.

Director: Ben Affleck

Writers: Chris Terrio (screenplay), Joshuah Bearman (article)

Stars: Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston and John Goodman