This was the approximate running time of CHE, Stephen Soderbergh’s epic character piece about the rise and fall of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, which had it’s NYC premiere last night at the Ziegfeld Theatre as part of the New York Film Festival. The film was presented in two, 2+ hour parts, with an intermission in between. The first half (which will be theatrically released as THE ARGENTINE) shows Che as a youngish doctor/revolutionary thinker, who meets an equally inspired Fidel Castro at a dinner party. Plans for the revolution are laid, and successfully carried out over the next two hours in the jungles, shacks, towns and cities of Cuba. We see Che’s transformation from field surgeon to battle-tested guerrilla leader, all the while hanging on to a strong set of unbending morals. The film is shot beautifully, with the U.S. segments (detailing Che’s 1964 trip to the U.N.) in a gritty, black-and-white newsreel style, and the Cuban segments gloriously bright, colorful and visceral. Benicio Del Toro is unrecognizable (as always) as Che, melting into the roll in a way you’d figure nearly impossible for such an iconic figure.

After grabbing a beer at the intermission (to celebrate the revolution, of course!), the second half of the film continued at the packed theatre. This section, which also will be released separately as THE GUERRILLA, starts about ten years later, with Che sneaking into Bolivia to continue his mission in South America. This section, more of a thriller than the first film, which was dominated by battle scenes, is also much tougher to watch. Che’s Bolivian mission was a failure nearly from the start, and we watch all his plans fall to pieces over a grueling year in the jungle. But the amazing performances and fine directing job keep you glued to it — surprising, given you already know how it ends, and it ain’t good.

Is this film perfect? Not by any means. They started to lose me in the first half, with skirmish after skirmish. I’m sure they could’ve found a half hour to cut out somewhere. But at the conclusion, you realize that the extended running time is part of the experience. Perhaps Soderbergh wanted the viewing experience to be grueling, to place the viewer deep into that unending cycle of hiding, fighting, starving, and surviving the elements, with success always a longshot and your beliefs the only thing keeping you warm at night. He’s probably a little too kind to Guevara in this piece — the guerrillas are obviously and always ‘the good guys’, which is definitely an oversimplification. But in the end, CHE is as much about the man as it is a love letter to guerrilla fighters everywhere, to the kind of men who unflinchingly stick to their beliefs despite every hardship, despite their own countrymen turning against them; men who accept death as the only alternative to victory.