The Weather Underground

Sam Green and Bill Siegel’s riveting documentary on the Weather Underground, the far-left militant splinter group of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) is more than documentation of and hindsight into the social and political turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s. It also is a very relevant window to the very seeds of modern terrorism and the very real, pressing potential of a small group of people to endanger and even sacrifice lives of the general populace in the name of moral superiority. A portrait of idealism, desperation and unbridled radicalism emerges through current interviews with former Weathermen, unpublished memoir-film footage and archival TV clips. The SDS initially was inspired by the nonviolence of the civil-rights movement and inflamed by the escalation of the Vietnam War and social injustice. The Weather Underground hijacked its 1969 Chicago national convention, began bombing government buildings and very nearly became party to mass murder during what one talking head here describes as a “children’s crusade gone mad.”