Argo is currently the front-runner to win Best Picture at the Oscars and should Ben Affleck win Best Director at the Directors Guild Awards this Saturday I can’t imagine what reason anyone would have for not predicting Argo other than blind hope something else would win.
That said, one thing about the film I was a little 50-50 on was that intense conclusion. The hold-up before getting onto the plane and the cars chasing the plane down the runway before it was airborne and safe. In an AP article at Yahoo, David Germain discusses it a little further against the reality of the situation as it happened:
That white-knuckle takeoff at the Tehran airport, with Iranian assault teams racing behind the jet down the runway? Never happened. In Mendez’s book “Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History,” the six Americans’ passage through the Tehran airport and onto the plane was uneventful. The takeoff and two-hour flight out of Iranian airspace is told in just four sentences.
Much like the escape, Argo is Hollywood audacity at its best, taking the gist of a true story and dressing it up into a fun night out.
From my perspective I can understand the escalation in tension one of two ways. 1.) As Germain’s piece states, dressing a real event up and turning it into a piece of Hollywood entertainment, or 2.) using an intense fabrication of the truth to visually represent what the six embassy employees were feeling as they made their escape. Perhaps it was uneventful, but I have a hard time believing their nerves weren’t on edge the entire time.
So I wanted to ask you, what do you think of the ending of the film? Was it too much? Did it take you out of the story or was it just what you needed to cap off the thrill ride?
