In 1980, a small plane carrying the Prime Minister, the Defense Minister and six others crashed during takeoff in Camarate, Portugal, killing all on board. The police investigation decided it was an accident caused by pilot error. But controversy raged for twenty years, and the Parliament investigated it no less than six times. Finally, in 2000, in response to a suit by the families of the survivors, the High Court had to decide whether to open a criminal investigation, or close the case forever.
So much is fact. This movie is a fictional account of how one judge might have made a decision on the case. Effective use is made of extracts from the official records, pointing out the contradictions, implausibilities and inadequacies of the police inquiry. The film "The Thin Blue Line" visually reenacted such points. "All the President's Men" and "JFK" implied similar points inside a framework of true-life events. Instead, here they are merely recited by one character to another within a dreary (and, the introduction states, invented) soap-opera storyline.
The judge allocated to the case is a woman, and the audience is supposed to be entertained by her personal dilemmas--jealous tension between her ex-husband and her current lover, and whether she should get an abortion or not. Other characters are one dimensional at best--the law professor who balances the conflicting investigations, the fellow judge who is both a conspiracy theorist and a would-be "Deep Throat". A clandestine meeting at a spectacular aquarium only serves as a metaphor for a fish-eat-fish sort of world. Lastly, in the print I viewed, the subtitles were too often projected against white backgrounds, making them invisible.
I discussed the movie's various hypotheses with someone familiar with air crash investigations. He reserved judgement on the pilot's actions, since that is mere speculation, and dismissed the various witnesses's claims of a bright light before the crash, since witnesses often confuse the sequence of events. But he did say that the trail of burned wreckage the plane left behind, if it truly existed, might provide indications whether a mid-air explosion occurred.
