In 1997, Heinrich Breloer made a spectacular docudrama (a documentary interspersed with acted drama) about the abduction of Hans Martin Schleyer, the head of the West German employer’s union, by the Red Army Fraction, a home-grown terrorist group, formed by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhoff.  The Baader Meinhoff Complex goes all the way to the beginning of the group in the late 1960s and tells the story of the group largely from the imagined perspective of the terrorists.  Breloer’s Todesspiel (Death Game) was compelling because he helped you understand why the terrorist acted the way they did and why the state reacted the way it did. Breloer interviewed the families of the terrorists and victims,  as well as the politicians who tried to defend the state against the terrorist group that tried to bring the state to its knees and overthrow capitalist institutions in the name preventing another social injustice on the scale of Nazi Germany.

The director/writer (Uli Edel) and the producer/writer (Bernd Eichinger) lack the insight and depth of Breloer. They uncritically based their film on the book of Stefan Aust, a long-term editor of the weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel and romantizes the protagonists of the RAF.  (Aust worked together with Ulrike Meinhoff at the magazine Konkret before Meinhoff became a terrorist and he later helped to free her children in Sicily and bring them back to their father.) Marc Fisher’s review the Aust book in the Washington Post captures the problem that also plagues the film: Strip away the soap opera and the high school intellectualism, and what remains is a simple tale of thugs in love with violence. The acting, however,  is superb. Moritz Bleibtreu does a wonderful job as Andreas Baader. There are also some funny moments in this too long film, for example, when the first generation of RAF members go to the Middle East for their military training.  But if you want to get a deeper understanding of the RAF, see Breloer’s Todesspiel (Death Game).