The Motorcycle Diaries
The Motorcycle Diaries
I’d just watched The Motorcycle Diaries. It is a depiction of the younger days of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, a medical student at that time with his friend Alberto Granado, a biochemist travelling 8,000 miles across South America. There’s good chemistry between these two main characters. From the start, we could see how different these two character are. Ernesto is quite reserve in his words and action while Arnado is quite an extrovert. They show a certain dynamic between them despite their differences. Well moving on, these two young men set their heart to travel with an old bike called La Poderosa II (The Mighty One II) from his home in Buenos Aires, Argentina to Venezuela.
The further they went, we could see how Ernesto begun to see the real Latin America and it’s people riddled with poverty and oppression, the high-handed businesses and the sheer hardship of daily life. He witnessed the exploitation of mine workers, persecuted communist, illness and the ruins of the descendents of the once great Inca civilazation. It goes to show that this is the pivotal point of his life that ignited his social and political awakening. What I noticed is that Guevara keeps a diary and logs everything in it. I’ve never read the book but I read some reviews that he is a very descriptive writer. I really love it when the movie shows magnificent breathtaking scenery and narrated by the young Guevara. This movie helps us in understand the beginnings of a young man destined to fight for his people with his own idealism and political understanding. We could almost see why he choose the way he fights in later years to come. Though in this movie, it doesn’t really show where he gets his political ideas from (That would be another story to tell I guess). So overall this is a really good movie and I’d enjoyed it very much. Truly a must watch movie.
