Der Baader Meinhof Complex is a bang-bang, shoot-shoot, sex-sex, un-thrilling thriller that glams-up the controversial Baader Meinhof terrorist group, who unleashed a series of attacks in West Germany during the late-1960s, early-1970s. The bombings and the rest – similar in spirit to Italy’s Red Brigades – were part of a violent streak in the popular unrest that swept the world in 1968, violence that never materialized on this side of the Atlantic (not that it didn’t look at the time like it might). As a result, the legacy of 1968 has left a much different aftertaste in Europe. It was closer to a true revolution.

Unfortunately, Der Baader Meinhof Complex is little more than a propaganda piece that glorifies the idealistic and uncompromising young pseudo-communists who tried to take part in the global revolution. But as a propaganda piece, it is curiously paradoxical: what true red-blooded communist wouldn’t squirm at watching the supposed heroes of the revolution done up on the big screen like a bunch of slick-talking Brad Pitts and James Deans? In a meta-textual way, Der Baader Meinhof Complex offers an interesting commentary on how our current generation sees its forefathers. It is Coca-cola Communism in the spirit of the Che Guevara t-shirt. No matter your political affiliations, it is dispiriting to see the revolutionary spirit reduced to such tom-foolery.

Der Baader Meinhof Complex possesses an implicit respect and admiration for its own characters. They are an under-developed collection of students and scruffy-faced Calvin Klein models as well as Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck), a popular newspaper columnist turned radical bomber. Meinhof is the only character with any weight, and as we watch her become involved with the group, disillusioned with the seeming impotence of her newspaper columns, we wonder what would drive her to abandon her family, her kids, and the small liberties of normal life for the cause. The film doesn’t fill out the motives very well; we are told she really believes in the violent action that has boiled up in response to a heap of catalogued injustice: Vietnam, Richard Nixon, Israeli’s Palestinian aggression, memories of the Nazis.

If you are interested in this period of history and would like to get a handle on what exactly were the spirit of the times, you would be better served with a film that came out on the tenth anniversary of that crazy year, Deutschland im Herbst (1978), a seminal work of the New German Cinema which features a collaboration between such German cinematic heavyweights like Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Alexander Kluge, as well as writing credits that include Heinrich Böll.

The 1960s in Germany represented a branch of global unrest that possessed its own unique and interesting storyline. Members of the generation born in the years of the Nazi regime pushed their parents for answers, demanded new revelations and new justice from members of the national socialist generation. Deutschland im Herbst digs into this thirst for (and subsequent disillusion with) revelation and the desire to restore the German name. Although it deals with the same era, Der Baader Meinhof Complex seems to seek affirmation from a new generation – the children of the 1968ers. Rather than grapple with complicated significance of the past, it reveals a desire to revel in a kind of pop-history that reduces ideas and ideologies to quipy manifestations of our vainest desires. Communism – revolution: it’s all about naked chicks and loud guns, man, feeling good and looking good. Baader Meinhof becomes representative of the real world revolution, the one that seeks utopia as expressed in the freeze frame of a perpetual advertisement.

Now playing at the Angelika Film Center Dallas.