Bus 174
I heard about this documentary years ago from a friend. It’s the tale of a bus hijacking in Brazil, what leads up to it, the life of the hijacker. You could say I put it on my to watch list as mostly something without the intention of actually watching it, but then it came on cable one day and we Tivoed it. It remained on there for like, a year at least, and we finally got around to watching it.
For awhile, I really thought “what is this going on about?” It seemed like there was a lot of unnecessary information and the movie was quite a bit longer than it needed to be.
However, I think this was done on purpose to really build up the suspense. Towards the end, the last 30 minutes or so, the movie got really tense. It started focusing a lot more on just the incident itself, versus the background of Sandro and what perhaps led him to taking the bus. I really began to be nervous, could almost feel my heart beating, with wonder at what was going to become of the situation.
The story of the lives these street children lead in Brazil was extremely sad. Thousands of kids, abandoned for whatever reason, and just left to their own devices. They’re treated so horribly, and grow into this cycle of violence and mistreatment, it’s easy to see how someone who grew up in that would resort to such a drastic measure as to take an entire bus hostage.
It’s one of those situations where I really want to try and do something to help the people, but I have no idea where to begin. Their entire situation seems so hopeless, and as someone who has always lived in the US, I can’t really even fathom how these kinds of things can go on somewhere else in the world. It’s shocking and really depressing.
I don’t want this to seem like I’m giving the movie a bad review, because I actually quite liked it. I hope everyone takes the time to see it – set aside the two hours!
My Rating: 3.5/5
