The Weather Underground (2002)
The Free History Project

Description

This film tells the unbelievable story of the weathermen the group of 70s radicals who fueled by outrage over the vietnam war & racism in america went underground throughout much of the decade to wage a low-level war against the government. It includes modern day interviews with key members & founders.

Tags

1970s, Oscar nomination, Terrorism, USA

Collected reviews and ratings

10 Austin Chronicle | Marjorie Baumgarten

Despite its historical riches, The Weather Underground is hardly a stroll down memory lane. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: These voices and images from the past could not seem more urgently contemporary. Maybe it’s the times we live in, but the message these old revolutionaries bear about the thin line that exists between political determination and social despair has never sounded more trenchant.
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10 digitallyobsessed.com | Jon Danziger

You say you want a revolution? Well, you know, we all want to change to world. In a banner year for documentaries (The Fog of War, Capturing the Friedmans, My Architect), The Weather Underground is among the first tier, a pungent revisiting of one of, literally, the most explosive periods in recent American history.
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9.0 San Francisco Chronicle | Carla Meyer

Powerful and surprisingly timely, the film explores the interweaving of idealism and terrorism and the frustration of true believers who found that neither approach resulted in much change.
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9.0 DVD Town | James Plath

Directors Sam Green and Bill Siegel assembled some stunning archival footage and photos from the Sixties, many of which are quite different from the usual clips, or else are longer segments of stock footage. There are newscasts, footage of bloody demonstrations and seldom seen shots from the Vietnam War, graphic photos of the Charles Manson massacre victims—even FBI surveillance photos. But what makes this film really work are the interviews that Green and Siegel conducted with many of the Weathermen, and one of the FBI agents who pursued them.
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8.8 DVD Verdict | Paul Corupe

The Weather Underground is a vital look at the limits of democratic protest that is much more powerful and thought provoking than any of Michael Moore's films. As both a political commentary and a deeply personal look at the people that were involved, this is a truly must-see documentary.
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8.0 Amazon user reviews

his film, rich in period footage (and some unnecessary sensationalism) captures the era somewhat broadly. But the present-day interviews with the participants, contrasted with their radical selves, provides an exceptionally detailed look inside the organization itself. It's not a nostalgic look back, and the overall mood is sobering rather than celebratory.
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8.0 New York Times | Elvis Mitchell

''Underground'' tells the story of a splinter group of young people from the Students for a Democratic Society, or S.D.S. And here the directors Sam Green and Bill Siegel have unearthed a great story that had fallen into oblivion: the young, violent and glamorous antiestablishment militants of the 1960's.
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8.0 PopMatters.com | Chris Elliot

Gaining resonance with today's "war on terror," Sam Green and Bill Siegel's documentary, The Weather Underground, recalls another unsettled social scene, during another unsettled period, the U.S. during the late 1960s and the 1970s. Working in tightly constructed cells, dispersed around the country, the Weathermen employed strategically targeted violence in an effort, in their words, to overthrow the U.S. government.
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8.0 efilmcritic.com | Chris Parry

The Weather Underground proves to those few of us who try to see both sides of an argument that evil is a mere perception; a label that is used to refute someone else's argument without actual debate. In the end, if we are going to spread 'democracy' to all parts of the world, is it really possible to do so at the end of a gun?
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8.0 filmcritic.com | Chris Barsanti

It’s a painful documentary in many ways because even though the filmmakers are obviously sympathetic to the politics of the Weathermen, they can’t hide the fact that this was essentially a pretty useless little band.
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7.5 Chicago Sun-Times | Roger Ebert

Within a few years, Students for a Democratic Society would be captured by a far-left faction which became the Weather Underground, the most violent protest group in modern American history. The new documentary "The Weather Underground" chronicles those early days of idealism, and their transition into a period when American society seemed for an instant on the point of revolution.
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7.5 The Onion A.V. Club | Scott Tobias

... most of all, The Weather Underground serves as a fascinating window into an era of radical dissent that now seems centuries past.
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7.5 Combustible Celluloid | Jeffrey M. Anderson

t's hard to imagine that not long ago, Americans could go on television and openly criticize their government -- and not just the current administration, either. The entire democratic system. The whole shebang. Nowadays, those people would be shut down and squashed faster than you can say "Dixie Chicks."
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7.0 Exclaim! | Erin Oke

The film is an ably put together standard documentary combination of interviews and stock footage, which puts the movement into a proper historical context and views it with a critical yet sympathetic eye.
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