The first half of Steven Soderbergh’s monumental two-movie portrait of Che Guevara has arrived: opaque and enigmatic enough, probably, to count as a “diptych”. Those hoping for a rich, warm dramatisation in the manner of Walter Salles’s 2004 film The Motorcycle Diaries, about Che’s early life, will have a shock in store. For this is a very austere film which does not regard its job as getting under the skin of the world’s famous revolutionary, or finding out what makes him tick. This film only shows Che the public man, addressing his comrades over dinner, or addressing his soldiers in the jungle, or addressing the international delegates at the UN.

Che never goes off duty in this epic, and those who stick with it over both movies may well be perplexed at how very little of Che’s life it covers. Starring Benicio del Toro as Che and Demian Bichir as Fidel, this first film shows him making landfall on Cuba with his fellow insurrectionists and then tracks his progress, in what feels like real time, until the victory of 1959: this action is interspersed with his later, sensational appearance at the UN in New York in 1964. The second film shows his long, agonised, failed revolution in Bolivia — again, almost

in minute-by-minute real time. Neither film will shed any light on his feelings about the missile

crisis, his renunciation of Cuban citizenship and the apparent break with Fidel, or his aborted revolution in the Congo.

Steven Soderbergh’s cinematography and Juan Pedro de Gaspar’s art direction create a superbly persuasive sense of mood, time and place, though I wonder if Del Toro’s performance was too gruff. Che himself may well have been more fluent and educated.

For all its severity and reserve, Soderbergh’s Che is an adventure: massively serious and ambitious. It certainly underlines the film-maker’s determination to maintain an absence of auteur identity: the director who made the Ocean’s Eleven movies and the remake of Solaris has come up with something very different from either. It is far from being a biopic, more a cinematic extrapolation of Che’s iconic status, and by that token it may exasperate some. Others will be engrossed by this flawed, sprawling, intriguing movie.