The Weather Underground

The radical branch of the Students for a Democratic Society, which split off from the parent organization in the 1960s to engage in increasingly violent anti-war activity, is the subject of this solid though technically conventional documentary by Sam Green and Bill Siegel. The Weathermen, as they called themselves from a Bob Dylan lyric, undertook a campaign of small-scale destruction and subversion of authority in 1969, after mass demonstrations had failed to spark a change in Vietnam policy; but their philosophy encompassed a condemnation of racism as well as the war. The Weather Underground sketches the history of the movement through archival footage and recent interviews, and while it doesn't get much beneath the surface--the filmmakers don't seem to have pressed the erstwhile revolutionaries very hard about the ramifications of their acts--the film does a competent job of covering the basics. Also, at a time when terrorism has taken on so brutal and vicious a character, it almost evokes a feeling of nostalgia for an era in which principled, if misguided, rebels took care to insure that the bombs they set did damage only to property rather than people. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)