Absolutely brilliant

I have absolutely never seen anything like this movie before. You have to see this movie.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

It's April 22, 1988. Three or four gendarmes are dead and 30 kidnapped by Kanak separatists on the eve of the presidential election in France. They are sending in a platoon of 50 paras to New Caledonia. The PM sends in the Army to take control. There is a political competition between Mitterrand and Chirac, and everything is caught up in it. GIGN Captain Philippe Legorjus (Mathieu Kassovitz) and his men end up following the Army's orders. But soon they have to struggle against the army's barbaric tactics.It's a good historical drama. It's a bit simplistic with the Army being all bad. I'm not familiar with any of this story to have an opinion about its validity. All I can say is that it works as a dramatic movie.

Rebellion is a good hostage movie. It presents a refreshing balanced view of what taking hostage means, which is not without reminding Dog Day Afternoon. Like it, it depicts real life hostage takers, not as dehumanized machiavellian bad guys, but as relatively ordinary people making bad decisions and the unravelling of violence it unleashes. But where Dog Day Afternoon, as an American movie, focuses on individual responsibility, Rebellion focuses on the reaction of society and its flaws, and this is where I have problems with the movie. I am not very familiar with that particular historical event, but the director, in its eagerness to show that violence could have been avoided, seems to give a bit quickly absolution to the hostage takers. They killed 4 innocent and unarmed policemen? Well, they regret, so it's OK to not surrender and even take more hostages. They make realistic demands, such as: "state officially that we are not terrorists or we kill the hostages" (!!), and intend to exploit their crime mediatically. What can be wrong with that?

It's a very difficult topic, a political one. And of course who else to direct and star in it, then the La Haine director. He knows about controversy. And he doesn't shy away from painting a France, that is anything but nice. Of course politicians will generally be seen as evil, but this movie is based on real life events and you can imagine how this might have played out.There are grey areas in the film, but you do get a lot of black&white moral decisions too. Even our main character is not flawless. He might seem one way, but you wonder if he could've gone or done some other things throughout the movie. The fact that you get a subtitle with each new day, lets you know that something is about to happen. So while it does seem inevitable, you still hope for something. Especially if you're not as familiar with what happened in 1988.While the movie seems to lose a bit its tension after a third of its running time is over, it picks up right after that. Not everyones taste, but a drama that will leave you wonder how this could've happened 25 years ago? Which sort of answers my initial question! Though the title cards at the end suggest that there will be a vote for independence ... lets hope it'll happen in 2014 as it is/was announced

This is the best Mathieu Kasssovitz' picture up now. This one, he thought about it since a while now. He did not make it only to pay his bills. It will remain his masterpiece. Nothing to do with BABYLON AD, that was not his actual work. Every movie lover knows that.This very one tells in details everything about the famous and bloody affair of the Ouvea cave, which occurred in May 1988, where the french army elite troops annihilated the local rebels - the Kanaks - who had taken a bunch of soldiers as hostages. This film is awesome because we don't find here any good soldiers vs bad rebels or bad soldiers vs good rebels scheme. The real ugly ones are ONLY the politicians who ordered the slaughter of the rebels, despite the hostages' lives!!! And only to serve their own politics purposes, power purposes. Because the close presidential elections. When you think of this movie, even long after seeing it, you may feel dizzy. You may puke on yourself. I am not proud to be a french citizen after watching this real gem.