Review of Storm the Skies

A somewhat conventional but nevertheless very interesting Spanish documentary about Ramon Mercader, the Catalan assassin of Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940. Following the orders of Stalin's security services, Mercader used the assumed name of Frank Jackson and got close to the exiled revolutionary by seducing a woman of his inner circle. We learn about his background (his mother was a hard line Stalinist), about how the assassination took place (with an ice ax, this is naturally the most interesting part of the film), and what happened to him after he was released following a 20 year old sentence in prison (he moved to Cuba and then to the Soviet Union, where he would live until the late 1970s and where he is buried; apparently in his old age he was mildly disillusioned with the socialist system).