So, I've been itching to see this flick ever since it came out, and especially ever since Nelson Mandela, or "Madiba", as he was affectionately known, died.

I found it to be a very interesting and ultimately quite fair portrayal of an extraordinarily complex, flawed man who ultimately oversaw the peaceful end to one of the most oppressive regimes in African history and a smooth tradition to democracy in its aftermath. Along the way, we are given insight into the life of a passionate man who transitions from an ambitious young lawyer to the leader of an embryonic African National Congress. Years of frustration and repeated attempts at nonviolent resistance to Apartheid and its pre-1948 precursors ultimately culminate in the extremely violent (but all too tragically accurate) recreation of the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre of peaceful protesters boycotting the pass system: an internal passport network that heavily regulated and restricted the movement of blacks within South Africa, which served the political purpose of controlling the movement of the black population while also fulfilling the economic purpose of deliberately keeping South African blacks in a status of economic inequality and dependence upon the Apartheid regime. It was the bloodletting at Sharpeville that ultimately polarized the struggle between the African National Congress and the South African government. It was also one of the major pivotal moments in the shift in tactics of the ANC from passive resistance to violent struggle.

The issue of the validity of violent resistance (albeit to a regime that is also extremely violent) is one of the consistent themes of the film. The ANC raids lead by Mandela primarily take place against unmanned factories and installations in the evening (presumably to provide night cover, in addition to avoid causing civilian casualties) seem to be the film's portrait of "good" violent resistance, whereas the more hardline attitude of all-out war taken by Winnie Mandela and her supporters (including a brief but horrific nod to the punishment killings of police informants) seems to be the portrayal of "bad" violent resistance. It sets up an interesting dilemma, but the morally grey areas that lurk between these two extremes rarely seem to be explored. However, I temper the criticism I do have of this film with the acknowledgement that this is first and foremost a biography of Nelson Mandela, and that the film has to condense decades of history and the very complex figure that was Nelson Mandela into something that is the length of a feature film. So, in that aspect, while I have some complaints about the general direction of the film, I ultimately found that this was a very fitting tribute to Nelson Mandela and one that did fundamentally understood the conflicts he had to face as a man who had to fight an unjust system, yet who also had to assure that the struggle he fought would not ultimately destroy everything he had hoped to create.

Pros: Adequately conveyed Nelson Mandela's pivotal role in South Africa's decades-long, ongoing journey towards racial equality without shying away from his own role in the use of violent resistance and the more militant wing of the anti-Apartheid movement (most notably exemplified by his own wife, Winnie Mandela), solid acting, and most major figures in the story of Nelson Mandela got to tell what needed to be told.

Cons: Suffered from the somewhat inevitable "Hollywood treatment" that accentuated the myth over the man, the role of South African whites in ending Apartheid was generally glossed over, but condensing decades of history into a feature film assured that this happened to a lot of the great untold stories of Apartheid in South Africa. The film's question of whether or not violence is justified seems mostly superficial.