In the wake of Agro winning best drama flick at the Golden Globes last week, and in my quest of seeing Oscar nominated movies, I found it still playing at a local theater. The audience was quite large for a movie that was released October 12, over 3 months ago.
Although the synopsis reads
A dramatization of the 1980 joint CIA-Canadian secret operation to extract six fugitive American diplomatic personnel out of revolutionary Iran.
I like the tag line:
The movie was fake. The mission was real.
Seeing this movie a week after Zero Dark Thirty set up compare and contrast thoughts for me. Both are set in the middle east in a very political charged environment. Both are based on real stories so I knew how both would end. Argo was more “Hollywood” which went along with the the plot of pretending to make a movie to get the Americans out of Iran. Argo had comic relief, great one liners, and John Goodman delivering an animated performance. There was anxiety in the movie (the woman sitting next to me gasped and cringed in scenes where it looked like the mission was going to fail) but the focus was more on the relief of all having a happy ending.
Zero Dark Thirty didn’t have the same relief of a happy ending. We’ll see which movie goes home with the Oscar on February 24.