I'm not going to surprise anyone by stating this documentary was made exclusively with westerners in mind.
They remember the bringer of freedom, Gorbi the Punished. And the actual country he kneecapped is extraneous, let them eat Pizza Hut, my fellow freedom lovers.
Thankfully, Werner doesn't even try to pretend he is being objective. In the first 10 minutes, he states that he loves the man, and it's hard to even be resentful of his bias.
And so Mikhail solvently tells bits and pieces of his rise and downfall, seemingly not understanding the questions he is being asked. No, it's not a mistranslation in the subtitles; he sometimes genuinely doesn't understand what is asked of him, such as his response to the Chernobyl question. Ironically, he became the same fossil as Andropov and Chernenko.
The personal touches are not that compelling because, once again, you're barely given any actual personality of the man. For an hour he copes, thinking that he had some kind of chance to keep the union, and now we are crying about his wife.
With westerners in mind, no Russians are actually interviewed. And no one who actually lived through the decade he helped create has given their assessment of his legacy, you know beyond saying 30 times that he stopped nuclear war.
No, we only have Horst Teltschik with a straight face saying that the Russian border full of NATO countries is the safest border they can dream of and they should actually pay attention to Iran and China. A statement that seemed asinine in 2019 and now appears to be straight up schizophrenic for both sides of the border. It begs the question of what kind of documentary it would be in 2022-23.
They remember the bringer of freedom, Gorbi the Punished. And the actual country he kneecapped is extraneous, let them eat Pizza Hut, my fellow freedom lovers.
Thankfully, Werner doesn't even try to pretend he is being objective. In the first 10 minutes, he states that he loves the man, and it's hard to even be resentful of his bias.
And so Mikhail solvently tells bits and pieces of his rise and downfall, seemingly not understanding the questions he is being asked. No, it's not a mistranslation in the subtitles; he sometimes genuinely doesn't understand what is asked of him, such as his response to the Chernobyl question. Ironically, he became the same fossil as Andropov and Chernenko.
The personal touches are not that compelling because, once again, you're barely given any actual personality of the man. For an hour he copes, thinking that he had some kind of chance to keep the union, and now we are crying about his wife.
With westerners in mind, no Russians are actually interviewed. And no one who actually lived through the decade he helped create has given their assessment of his legacy, you know beyond saying 30 times that he stopped nuclear war.
No, we only have Horst Teltschik with a straight face saying that the Russian border full of NATO countries is the safest border they can dream of and they should actually pay attention to Iran and China. A statement that seemed asinine in 2019 and now appears to be straight up schizophrenic for both sides of the border. It begs the question of what kind of documentary it would be in 2022-23.