While this is indeed an interesting retelling of a 'truth-larger-than-fiction' event during the Iranian hostage crisis, and while it's OK that it focuses entirely on the American perspective of the task of liberating six escaped embassy staff members, I cannot help but feel uncomfortable about the timing of this film.

We're looking at the possibility of yet another war, after all, and the widespread hostility towards Iran as a nation is where the support for this film cunningly taps from. There is an introductory admission that the Iranian Revolution was the direct result of the US reinstatement of the absolutist Shah, who ruled via his suppressive secret police SAVAK. What's not mentioned, however, is that SAVAK was trained by CIA officers under the supervision of Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf, father of Norman Schwarzkopf who commanded Operation Desert Storm. So the rampant displays of Anti-Americanism are, as far as Iran is concerned, not without reason, and one would have wished that, in these sensitive times, the almost documentary style approach Affleck has chosen would consider this; after all, in the case of other countries (such as Chile) it is meanwhile generally accepted that such policies were crimes. SAVAK also has a special history with Germany (my country of residence), for their clashes with leftist protesters on the occasion of the Shah's state visit in 1967 was the starting point of the student revolution of '68, which eventually swept all across Western Europe. This event has been shockingly reconstructed in the first ten minutes of Uli Edel's 'Baader Meinhof Komplex' (2008).

To be sure, it's a fascinating story, its pace and perspective are logically focused on the planning of the rescue and the plight of the persons concerned. However, Iranians are reduced to a backdrop of a fanaticized mob, and that must make anyone who's actually been there feel rather queasy. The only sympathetic Iranian character throughout this film is the (briefly shown) crew's guide; when the 'film crew' tours a bazaar there is a hostile altercation with an angry mob over the taking of a photograph; the Canadian ambassador's maid is a traitor... a little more balance or just one scene with dialogue for one of the Iranian characters could have relieved the feeling of this being a propaganda effort, but instead we get a lot of patriotic 'no-one-gets-left-behind' talk, and an unnecessary chase scene which evidently didn't happen.

The way it plays, 'Argo' could well be interpreted as a rallying call for yet another war - AKA 'we've got every reason to bomb 'em for humiliating us 32 years ago'. And I was really hoping that Americans have grown tired of this, since it didn't work so well the last ten years. 'Charlie Wilson's War' (about financing Afghanistan's mujahedeen and then letting them slip out of control once the Russians were gone) was a lot more honest.

In short, Iran is not the country you might think it is after watching this film, as last year's foreign language Oscar-winning film 'A Separation' perfectly illustrates. What these times need is a documentary effort about the thousands of Iranians living in the US since the Islamic revolution, and what their hopes and fears for the state and future of their country are. Update: now there is one, it's called 'The Iranian Americans', was screened on PBS and is available for free online streaming.