Steven Soderbergh has the knack of draining the passion out of his films (The Good German, The Informant) in a myriad of ways and with his reverential Che Part One he applies them all. Sloppy composition, repetitive detail to the trivial, disjointed editing that looks like it was cut with a machete and lack of character development in anyone except St.Che who more resembles Gandhi than the charismatic and fervent revolutionary who was prone to atrocity ("Can't have a revolution without firing squads"-Lenin).<br /><br />Part One covers Che's triumphant Cuban guerrilla war from 1956-1959 that brought down the brutal dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. It is clumsily cross cut with Guevera's speech at the UN after Fidel takes power (thankfully color coded in B&W to tell us where we are) and the jarring transitions further impede the films flow save for Che re-phrasing his humanist viewpoint ad nauseum. In the field it gets even more inane as Soderbergh has Che command his followers in a gentle voice that can hardly be heard above the crickets and birds. He's acts more like a parent with recalcitrant teens than rebels and in one case orders sulking soldiers to return a freshly liberated set of hot wheels. Soderbergh lays it on even thicker with his gracious door to door visits to peasants' homes for food, begging and always paying. Che also spends more time doctoring, reading and tutoring math than engaging the enemy, though he does manage at one point to assert action hero status grabbing a bazooka from an inept subordinate and firing a direct hit. Soderbergh completes his canonization by closing Part One with the victorious Che 200 miles out of Havana and for good reason since it would be difficult for his lead to maintain an ethereal demeanor while ordering mass executions without trial.<br /><br />Looking and speaking in the compassionate tone of an apostle, Bernicio Del Toro shows little of the drive and intensity that Che had to have had to triumph against overwhelming odds. Instead we get an introspective Che in heroic pose reading and writing in his journal and stressing education. The rest of the cast is marginalized including an ambiguous Fidel.<br /><br />With Che Part One Soderbergh ultimately does Guevera a disservice by sanitizing him and in doing so sucks the vitality and complexity out of a man who by his accomplishments had a lot more about him than is said in this ponderous quagmire of a film.