Argo earned the respect of my difficult to please uncle and for that I wasn't surprised to hear that it won an Academy Award. Now that I've seen it, I don't understand it. The movie didn't stand out to me and didn't draw me in, nor did I get invested at all in what was happening. It felt small and trivial, and the end didn't have me cheering. The Academy Award it won for film editing seems completely wrong, since there's nothing special about it whatsoever. In fact, I didn't like the editing at all. I was also promised that Argo contained a fresh blend of both serious and humorous elements that the ideal movie often has, but the humor fell flat everywhere except for when the titular film within the film, Argo, was in development.

I'm not saying that this is a bad film. My uncle watched it and said it was the only true good movie he had seen throughout the year. The friends I watched it with really liked it. But bear in mind, it doesn't stand out, and I wish that it didn't have an Academy Award for Best Picture to inflate my expectations. It would be best to watch this without any expectations at all.

As usual with movies today, the cuts are too short, even when they don't need to be. The Iranians start off potentially very humanized but fall into a stereotype. Like many other films today, it also starts off with a promise to get a big picture perspective on this event in history, and it fails to give us that perspective. And because I'm left wondering why I should care about the hostages who were kept in the Canadian embassy, a question the film doesn't answer, I just get annoyed with them. The actors did a good job, since everyone seems real and believable. They're all remarkably similar to their real-life counterparts. But I still don't care, even if this is based off a true story. All the decisions going into making this film felt arbitrary, and that's exactly what I hate about films these days. Arbitrariness is the bane of good films these days that undermines everything, from drama to comedy. Arbitrariness is what kills a director who otherwise would have had a vision. But Ben Affleck is no visionary.

All these negative things having been said, the story isn't bad. The acting isn't bad. Everything with John Goodman and Alan Arkin kept me in the movie. But the moment Tony Mendez walks into Iran, I stopped caring about the movie. Especially since I knew that this was inspired by real historical events, and I figured that the film would have a little more reverence for that fact. It could have used the concrete narrative of history to at least add to its atmosphere. There's also that age-old problem of knowing that in a film inspired by a true story, it's difficult to tell what's historically accurate and what's not, especially in a film like this where everything is so arbitrary. Since it is inspired by an interesting real-life story, however, it is inevitably a story that's technically pretty good. The directing could have easily been better, but on paper the screenplay is good. Since it's merely "inspired" by a true story, though, and not modeled completely off of it, I can't help but wish that the true story had "inspired" them to create a screenplay of CIA agents who actually worked on their fake movie in Iran, since that would have been more colorful and the film would have lived up to its title.