Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Bereamic Awesome Movie

Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

jose_luna10 As a Salvadorian, it is an offense to watch this movie. I am a big fan of Oliver Stone, but sometimes it is evident that Stone gets carried away with emotion and his political views create too much bias; especially in this film. Stone fails to capture the essence of the conflict and most important to capture the reality of the situation. He portrays and depicts the right wing as terrorists while failing to show that the left guerrillas were even worse in their actions. The left guerrillas destroyed the country and everything that was good about it. The guerrillas enrolled child soldiers and spread hatred among Salvadorians. Stone failed to show how the right wing actually tried to help a country divided by a communist movement occurring across a Latin American level. Most important, what truly is offensive is the assassination of Monseñor Romero. This is so false, since Monseñor was shot by a sniper who nobody ever saw or knew who it was. Also, to this day nobody knows who is responsible for this assassination. This is a good film in the sense of fiction, because James Woods and Belushi give out an excellent performance. But this movie does not depict the reality of the situation at all. Please do not use it as a way of educating people about the war in El Salvador, because this is nothing like it. This is pure fiction and plus it is all shot in Mexico. To be fair I enjoy the acting but the movie should have never been called "Salvador", because it has nothing to do with the real conflict. Do not be misguided or fooled by Stone's leftist tendency. I have much respect for Mr. Stone but here he just shows how he really is an advocate for the modern socialist movement.

rogerdarlington "Platoon" and "Salvador" were both released in 1986 and both written and directed by the renegade Oliver Stone. The former won the Academy Award for Best Film, while the latter was a commercial failure. Stone found it extremely difficult to get finding for "Salvador" and it was made on a low budget. Clearly, this brave, but uncomfortable, film - an examination of the poverty and carnage of the developing civil war in 1980-81 El Salvador - was just too political and too critical of American foreign policy for Hollywood financiers US audiences.However, James Woods gives an excellent and Oscar-nominated performance as a self- centred and hard living American war photographer based on the real-life Richard Boyle who co-wrote the script. A number of the incidents portrayed - notably the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero - actually happened. The anarchic violence is reminiscent of "Missing", while the photographer-at-war theme reminds one of "Under Fire", two other political films about Latin America (it was actually shot in Mexico). The movie is fast-paced, powerful and committed with the Boyle character making something of a polemical speech - justifiably hard-hitting - in a scene set in the US Embassy in San Salvador.I first saw the film on its release in the UK in 1987. I revisited the work after I went to El Salvador in 2014, a trip which included seeing the tomb of Romero and the site of a Government-sponsored massacre. The civil war actually began in 1989, was still running at the time of the making of "Salvador", and did not end until 1992. By then, some 70,000-80,000 had been killed, including around 'disappeared'.

tieman64 One of director Oliver Stone's better films, "Salvador" revolves around a sleazy journalist who travels to El Salvador in order to document the Salvadoran Civil War.All of Stone's tics and traits are here: fast-talking macho men, vulgarity and humour as a tool used to lighten political preaching, sympathy toward left-wing rebels, motormouth dialogue, pacey editing, subplots about whores and drug addicts, simple moral messages, forceful camera work and an aesthetic style which blends Costa Gavras and Scorsese (Scorsese was Stone's teacher at NYU).In terms of politics, the film aligns itself firmly with the peasants who fought against a US supported right wing military dictatorship, Stone mourning the death of rebels as US hardware and government soldiers mow down poor revolutionaries.Stone makes the point that the US has a history of financing right wing dictators (Nicaragua, Cambodia, Congo etc), but the film never really broadens its politics beyond this. Like "Viva Zapata!" or even "Braveheart", this is formulaic stuff, the audience positioned to root for the rebel underdogs because the bad guys have bigger guns and look/talk like Bond villains. Of course Stone is not wrong in his stance - the Western Empires have boosted dictators and evil regimes across most of the Mid East, Asia, Caribbean and Latin America - but it takes a genius to convey this kind of material whilst not seeming reductive.More interesting is how the film plays as a character study. James Woods stars as our hero journalist, and his performance is so frantic, so sleazy and insane, that we can't help but be engrossed. At its best, "Salvador" conjures up memories of Peckinpah's "Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia" and Hunter Thompson's "Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas", the heroes of all three films driving through the wilderness with bottles of whisky and cars full of cocaine.8/10 - It's hard to fathom how the man behind "W" and "World Trade Centre", the former being (arguably) a Bush apologists wet dream, the later being a slice of jingoism dressed up as a disaster movie, could make a film like "Salvador". Still, though every bit as well intentioned as "Wall Street", "Talk Radio" and "Born on the Fourth of July", Stone's sensibilities are far too heavy-handed, his film bashing us over the head and pulverising us into submission. Compare with: "The Quiet American", Pontecorvo's "Burn!", Cox's "Walker", "In The Year of the Pig" and "Hearts and Minds".Worth one viewing.

michaelhennessy8 As jobbing photojournalist Richard Boyle (James Woods) and his friend Dr. Rock (James Belushi) guzzle booze and drugs in a red convertible on their journey south of the border, you'd be forgiven for thinking you were watching a sort of Fear and Loathing in El Salvador. But where Hunter S. Thompson journeys into the heart of the American Dream, Oliver Stone's semi-biographical thriller explores its outward reach as franchiser to the Third World. What emerges is an exposé of the superpower's influence in creating a late-twentieth-century Heart of Darkness.No sooner do Boyle and Dr. Rock settle into the roles of the partying gringos than they find rifles pointed at them at a military roadblock. 'Whatever you do Doc', warns Boyle, 'don't get on the ground.' The first in a series of tense, sweaty set-pieces, Boyle must defuse the situation, armed only with a couple of knock-off watches and his oily charm. It is in these scenes of forced laughter with grave locals that the self-confessed 'weasel' Boyle excels; his defining characteristic appears to be his knack for self-preservation. It is a role perfectly suited to its star: no one balances sleaze with intensity quite like James Woods.Leeching and lying his way through encounters with acquaintances and enemies, Boyle is a strange, flawed protagonist. He lacks the maverick talent traditionally bestowed on the anti-hero, which is here embodied in old friend John Cassady (John Savage), a photojournalist fiercely committed to the ideal of the world-changing shot. But as Boyle bears witness to the atrocities committed and hypocrisies inherent in the country's Civil War, he becomes more impassioned with every picture he takes. Where he is initially concerned with staying off of the dreaded ground, he grows to stand up for those who are stuck there.Stone shoots the movie much like a war-photographer, capturing the atrocities as an outsider, and wisely reigns in the visual excess that would come to define much of his nineties work. 'Gotta get close to get the truth', Cassady intones as he climbs over a mound of corpses, 'You get too close, you die'. Stone's camera stays eye-level with his protagonist, casting from above the American gaze over a people who live on their knees, or else are strewn lifelessly across the landscape.Behind the brutal military regime that tries to suppress the (equally brutal) peasant guerrillas sits the U.S. government. Their presence as 'advisors' lends a sense of futility to the battle-scenes: no matter how bravely or well each side fights, Stone suggests, the outcome will ultimately be decided amongst Americans in an office far removed from the battlefield. Boyle professes his patriotism in a climactic speech that fails to convince, in spite of Woods' best efforts; channelling the outspoken Stone himself, he reserves his most damning accusations for the government of his homeland.Despite slipping into the preachy and manipulative at times- a distressing scene involving a group of nuns is particularly heavy-handed, regardless of whether it is based in fact- this is an effective, tense thriller, with some interesting contemplations of journalistic and political responsibility. As much character piece as polemic, Salvador is highly recommended, for Woods' wired performance in particular.