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The Baader Meinhof Complex Movie Review

The Baader Meinhof Complex is a 2008 German crime drama film directed by Uli Edel and starring Martina Gedeck and Moritz Bleibtreu. It’s a flawed, but important film.

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“If you throw a stone, it’s a crime.

If a thousand stones are thrown, that’s political“

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The movies offers a look at Germany’s terrorist group, The Red Army Faction (RAF), which organized bombings, robberies, kidnappings, and assassinations in the late 1960s and 1970s. This is a very serious, important subject matter and as somebody who isn’t from Germany I have to say that I didn’t know anything about it, so the movie functioned well as a history lesson.

The movie can be problematic to some due to the viewpoint being from the terrorists themselves. But that was a strong choice that led to us better understanding them and from which place these crimes came from. Most people don’t think that the far-left is capable of being violent, so this film serves as a great reminder that all extremist views and organizations can become problematic. These people were paranoid of Nazis being in the government, which reminds me of today’s far-left media in the US constantly making paranoid claims that the right is somehow coming for the rights of minorities.

So yes, The Baader Meinhof Complex is valuable as a history and politics lesson, but as a film it is very flawed. The character development is surprisingly weak for a film that focuses so much on these terrorists. They all individually needed to be fleshed out more, especially their intentions. The performances, though, are uniformly strong as its cast is quite stellar.

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The thriller elements worked and the movie is quite effective in its suspenseful and intense moments. For the most part, however, it functioned as a documentary in a way. It is very documentarian in how it goes through a staggering amount of details regarding this subject, which made it a bit stuffy and cluttered in narrative and dialogue. The runtime is also way too long, making it not as engaging as it should have been. The directing and editing are very competent, but better pacing and more of a focus on the narrative instead of documentarian elements would have made it less limited in appeal.