Like the Weather Underground in the United States, West Germany's Baader Meinhof group in the late 1960s was made up of leftist radicals who - fed on Trotsky, Mao and Che - decided that violent action was the only recourse against a political establishment they deemed imperialist.
Uli Edel's The Baader Meinhof Complex offers an electrically charged portrait of the Red Army Faction (RAF) founded by a band of college intellectuals, idealists and writers. While the fashions (miniskirts, go-go boots, leather jackets) may look cool, and the cast exceptionally photogenic, this tense and bloody reenactment doesn't glamorize or romanticize what the RAF revolutionaries did: bombings, bank robberies and kidnappings that left innocent citizens, as well as government figures, lawmakers and police, dead.
