It’s not quite as terrible as I thought it would be at first, but it’s still rather mediocre. “The Angel” is an incredibly facile recounting of Egyptian defector(?) Ashraf Marwan involvement in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. It’s a story that remains contentious on just about all levels, from the ideological to the factual. Like many Stateside-produced films about the Middle East, “The Angel”(the title is terrible) suffers from what can only be called CNN-itis. The background music always has to be some canned “vaguely Middle Eastern singing”(even though the scenes in question isn’t set at any of the five Muslim prayer times) because it doesn’t trust its audience to know that it’s main character is not European. If that doesn’t scream Orientalism, I don’t know what is. Then there is the way the film sentimentalizes Marwan and makes him out to be a hero who wants peace in the Middle East, because films like this apparently have it written in their contract that they have to pay lip service to world peace while exoticizing anything vaguely non-European.
While the film itself has enough cheesy suspense set pieces to make it tolerable, the main issue here is that the story itself is a complicated one that needs filmmakers with a more nuanced worldview in order to do justice to the material. As it is, “The Angel” is CNN-inspired hack work.
It’s not quite as terrible as I thought it would be at first, but it’s still rather mediocre. “The Angel” is an incredibly facile recounting of Egyptian defector(?) Ashraf Marwan involvement in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. It’s a story that remains contentious on just about all levels, from the ideological to the factual. Like many Stateside-produced films about the Middle East, “The Angel”(the title is terrible) suffers from what can only be called CNN-itis. The background music always has to be some canned “vaguely Middle Eastern singing”(even though the scenes in question isn’t set at any of the five Muslim prayer times) because it doesn’t trust its audience to know that it’s main character is not European. If that doesn’t scream Orientalism, I don’t know what is. Then there is the way the film sentimentalizes Marwan and makes him out to be a hero who wants peace in the Middle East, because films like this apparently have it written in their contract that they have to pay lip service to world peace while exoticizing anything vaguely non-European.
While the film itself has enough cheesy suspense set pieces to make it tolerable, the main issue here is that the story itself is a complicated one that needs filmmakers with a more nuanced worldview in order to do justice to the material. As it is, “The Angel” is CNN-inspired hack work.
