Sounds like a leftist fantasy to me...
Ok, let me get this straight. I don't know a single thing about Thailand except for the name, that it's somewhere near Laos and Vietnam, and that it's Sagat's country in the Street Fighter game. I didn't even know that a military dictatorship had taken place.
But I live in Chile, and I know what it is to have complete chaos in your country, to have a large mass of revolutionaries who actually encourage a civil war attitude, to then have a military dictatorship taking place, to then have the army fighting the revolutionary militia, then to have the army win that post civil war, and finally to have the militia leftovers claiming for their human rights as if they never had a warlike attitude towards soldiers.
The worst thing is that the only ones who get out of the country to tell their version of the dictatorship are obviously the ones against it. The result is an international nazi-type portrait of the new government which is quickly accepted since the public commonly shares some sort of desire for some hero-villain stories.
In Chile, our military dictatorship, which set the standards for our constitution and political orientation to this day, had a reputation quite similar to the one "Beyond Rangoon" portraits. In Spain and Sweden during the 80's, were went most of the Chileans who escaped or were exhiled, the circulating number of people slain in the dictatorship during the 70's was somewhere around 100,000. Which makes you think about the credibility of exhiled people's stories, since after a deep investigation carried out by national human rights organizations once the dictatorship was over in 1990, it was revealed that there were only 3,000 reported "missing" people during the ENTIRE 17 years dictatorship. At the same time, the new General of the army revealed that 400 members of the armed forces were killed during that period, soldiers, policemen, marines, etc... Nazi-type political oppression?? or post civil war confrontations? You make the call...
So ever since I went to Spain and realized that in the Spanish Parliament, speaking in favor of Chilean dictatorship leader Augusto Pinochet was actually prohibited, I've been quite careful regarding supposed "nazi-type" dictatorship stories. It's not that I automatically reject those stories, but unless I hear about different points of view, I'm not forming any opinion.
So when seeing this movie a couple of hours ago, some scenes left me with a sense of "ok, it COULD have happened, just don't reject it right away". However, ever since the slaughter began and Patricia Arquette started running, the main thought that popped in my head regarding that and most of the following scenes was simply "my ass...".
These are a couple of the scenes which made me realize that the movie is nothing more than a leftist revolutionary's wet dream:
- The first shocking thing we see once Patricia Arquette starts running is a street with the army on one side and a group of students "fighting for democracy" on the other side. I don't doubt that. What is truly absurd is that a student with a rose in his hands walks towards one of the soldiers forming part of an army human barrier, gets on his knees before the soldier, and while crying and begging for mercy to an attack which that group of soldiers had not even started yet, he gives the rose to him. Now I don't know what kind of left-wing groups did the writers of this movie hang out with, but a guy getting on his knees before a soldier and handing out flowers to him certainly does NOT fit with the profile of a leftist revolutionary student. The soldier's response is ridiculous as well: he starts kicking him. If I were an evil soldier, why would I care about a whining guy when there are hundreds of those in front of me??
- Then we have that whole "escape through the city" moment were apparently soldiers have no concept of military formation and just wander around on their own near public places waiting for a person to get near and kill him/her. I don't know how the army in Thailand works but the scattered carnivorous plant in ambush formation sounds ridiculous to me.
- After running through the streets, Laura and her friends get on a truck and have to pass through a checkpoint. When two soldiers start checking the truck, a group of civilians surprise the soldiers, disable them, and beat them up for one or two seconds before they get back on the truck. "Soldiers killed their brother so he feels like killing them as well" explains U Aung Ko. Excuse me, but had that actually happened, the civilians would have more likely taken at least a few minutes to crucify that pair of soldiers and burned them to death. But obviously an evil army vs struggling civilians movie can't afford that.
- Later, they get to a jungle and a monk confesses that he was actually a soldier. "I ran away when they told me to kill children" he says. Note that I don't justify the killing of children in any possible way, but I do know that if there was firing against children, it couldn't have just been a situation were soldiers were walking by, saw a group of children, and decided to kill them. There HAD to be a context even though it obviously didn't justify the killing. But the fact that the filmmakers didn't care to explain it is proof that the film is severely biased.
- In the jungle as well, Laura asks "How can they murder their own people?", which is basically the writers saying in your face "the ones from the other political movement are subhuman sadists with no principles". Any film which portraits one of two different political movements in conflict as "Sauron and his evil forces" is just rubbish propaganda if you ask me.
Thank you for your time.