*New Order* (this movie review is full of spoilers)

I found this Mexican movie unpleasant to watch, quite a few reviews are negative, and very few of you ought to see it.  Yet at least it is fundamentally interesting, and it does show off some skills of movie-making, such as good cinematography and creation of tension and communicating a sense of Mexico City.

Most gringos won’t understand it.  Most of the time watching you think it is a racist movie about revolt from indigenous Mexicans who stick together from motives of racist solidarity.  By the end of the movie, but only at the end, you realize the paler skinned elites of the Army engineered the whole thing.  What seemed to be the racism of the movie is in fact implicit commentary on the racist paranoia of the Mexican elites.  And then finally you realize that the outrages committed by the indigenous people in the movie are mirroring outrages committed under the Conquest (e.g., rape, kidnapping for ransom), and that in reality the Conquest is being re-committed each and every day by the elites, yet with these somewhat racist paranoid fantasies layered on top that the logic of the Conquest someday will be reversed by the indigenous.  And yet always it will be the elites in charge, who at the same time make their paranoid racist dystopian nightmares the fundamental narrative of society, thereby screwing everybody over double.  The faucets do not in fact produce green water, though kind of they do, as cadmium green is a national color of Mexico.

YMMV, but at least a day later I am still thinking about it.