“From 1965 to 1975,” says Mark Rudd, “I was always aware that we were attacking Vietnam.”  The first part of the film is dedicated to backstory and the war in Vietnam, laying the groundwork for how The Weathermen came to be.  The Vietnam footage in the film is unusually graphic: people being shot, bodies that have been blown up, photographs of massacres, and while some have called it unnecessary sensationalism, it shows the horror of war that people were seeing on television every day during that time.  Students had been protesting for years, taking the non-violent approach.  The Students for Democratic Society (SDS) was one of the largest anti-war groups in the country.  Non-violent protest was not working, and the SDS was beginning to implode.  The Weathermen were a splinter group of the SDS whose slogan was “Bring the War Home.”  They wanted to overthrow the government by any means necessary.

The Weather Underground remains objective in a way that most documentaries do not.  The opinions of the filmmakers are there, but they are more under the surface.  They do well with showing the period, showing The Weathermen, and letting the viewer decide.  The Weathermen were a violent group by design, and they were audacious in their execution, to a point that is difficult to imagine happening today.  They bombed the headquarters of the New York City Police Department, the Presidio in San Francisco, the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol, among many other targets.  The film shows that the political atmosphere in the U.S. was not unique, that there was social and military upheaval going on all over the world: France, Mexico, China, Cuba, Africa, etc.  The passion to end the war in Vietnam had spread throughout the radical left, and as the film unfolds, we see that an extreme movement like The Weathermen was inevitable in that environment.

The film follows the group from their break with the SDS, through the next few years to their time underground to when they finally turned themselves in.  Seeing them now, middle-aged, contrasted with their younger, more revolutionary selves is dynamic.  Some of them have mellowed, some of them (like Dohrn) are still fiery, but they all seem haunted by what they did.  None of them seem particularly proud of what they did, and they admit that in the end their tactics served only to fuel the nation’s move to the right with the election of Richard Nixon.

The Weathermen are not shown as heroes, nor were they shown negatively.  The former Weathermen do not paint themselves as heroes, but they are also not apologetic.  They believed in what they were doing.  As Billy Flanagan says, “When you believe you have right on your side, you’ll do some pretty horrific things.”  Their belief in that was ultimately their downfall.  When three of their own were blown up trying to construct a bomb, the turning point in the group was one from which they never recovered.

The Weather Underground is a tense documentary, and the music adds rich layers to the film.  Director Green gives a twofold reason for the music: they could not afford to use the music of the 1960’s, but they also wanted the film to resonate with today’s youth, and they did not think that ‘60’s classic rock would achieve the same effect.  They were better off this way.  Not having the same tired sixties music scoring a film about the sixties is a fresh approach, and the score gives the whole film an extra edge-of-your-seat quality that would not have otherwise been there. 

There is a sadness to the film as the years roll on and the relevance of The Weathermen fades.  Their calls to revolution fall on the ears of a complacent public, and after the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, there was a sense that they had outlived their usefulness.  The group devoured itself.  There is an uplifting coda to the story when we see how the marches for peace and civil rights inspired other movements: the women’s movement, the gay and lesbian movement.  The revolutionary spirit is carried on in different forms.

The power of The Weather Underground is in seeing it; the film footage from the time gives a stark image of those years that we have rarely seen.  Anyone who thinks that the anti-war group was made up of doped out hippies in tye-dye shirts will have their eyes opened by this film.

Commentary by director Sam Green: an interesting, informative commentary.  Green talks about how the film came to be, what it took to get all the principals together, some of the artistic choices that were made, and he addresses some frequently asked questions.

Commentary by former Weathermen Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers: an equally interesting commentary, the two former Weathermen talk about ‘60’s politics, what it was then and how it relates to today’s world, and they talk about the strengths and weaknesses of how they were portrayed.

Original Weathermen audio communiqués: when The Weathermen would pull off one of their actions, they would send a recorded communiqué to the media, and here we get to hear the first and fifth of these.  Spoken by Bernadine Dohrn, the audio quality is not so good, but this has more to do with the original recordings than the DVD itself.  These are interesting for the curious, but otherwise they quickly become boring.

Bonus film on former Weatherman David Gilbert: A Lifetime of Struggle: probably the highlight of the bonus material.  Gilbert, who is serving a 75-year-to-life sentence in prison, talks about his evolution as a revolutionary, the 1960’s political atmosphere, and how that atmosphere changed after the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam in 1975.  Portions of this interview were used in the film, but in this interview, roughly half an hour in length, we get the whole story.  Gilbert is an intelligent, clear, articulate speaker, and what he has to say is important.  While he shows some regret over the choices he made and the consequences of those choices, he is never apologetic.  Even if you skip the other material, this interview is a must-see.

Excerpt from the Emile de Antonio film Underground: a clip of this short documentary was used in the film.  Shot after the Weathermen had gone underground, it is a recording of a group of them sitting in a house, espousing their philosophies.  The clips that were in the film were enough, and trying to watch this on its own quickly becomes tiring.