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There will never be another Che Guevara. That's the judgment of American filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, creator of the two-part, 41/2 -hour epic about the Latin American revolutionary's battles in Cuba and Bolivia, which opens commercially on Friday.

“The speed with which we swallow and disgorge people is so accelerated now that things don't register in the same way that they did 50 years ago,” Soderbergh observed during an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, as he pondered Guevara's iconic status. “There is no question that the Cuban revolution today would have been stopped in a matter of weeks. It is what I call the last analog revolution. Even seven or eight years later, by the time Bolivia happened … war changed. I don't think we are going to see somebody like that emerge again. He really was a product of his time.”

Which only adds to the mystique of the doctor, thinker and guerrilla who helped Fidel Castro overthrow the Cuban government in 1959 but was executed by Bolivian forces in 1967 after a disastrous attempt to export the revolution.

Yet if moviegoers go to Che looking for elucidation, they may be disappointed. The epic, which is being screened across North America after a brief run in New York and Los Angeles before Christmas, is not so much a conventional biopic filled with motivational events or revealing moments as it is a portrait of a man, relayed through action.

“One of the things I was compelled by was his will, just the ability to sustain his belief in his ideas over a long period of time under extreme circumstances,” Soderbergh remarked. “It's very unusual. Most of us go through periods where we are very passionate about something or someone, but it tends to ebb and flow. In his case, it just doesn't.”

When Soderbergh was first approached by producer Laura Bickford and actor Benicio del Toro, who plays Guevara, about the possibility of a Che film, the director was curious simply to know more about the man behind the image that has adorned a million T-shirts. As the project developed – the film was eight years in the making – he decided it was this unrelenting aspect that made Guevara unusual.

For all the idolization over the years, he was not, however, a nice guy. “There was no point at which he dropped his ideology in dealing with people,” Soderbergh said. “Everything with him has to follow a certain standard. The people I talked to in Cuba [including family members and former comrades-in-arms], everybody said he was kind of a pain in the ass … a really strict disciplinarian.”

The movie was shot in two punishing shooting schedules of 39 days each, with the first part filmed in Puerto Rico, Mexico and New York, and the second in Bolivia and Spain. The two parts make up Che and are separated by an intermission. Soderbergh said his main instructions to his star, who had studied Guevara for years in preparation for the role, were hurry up.

“One of the few times that Benicio and I talked about the character, I just said, ‘Look, let's make sure he's not nice. He's fair, but he's not nice. Don't be afraid to be hard.'”

Still, the film is a sympathetic portrait. Thus far, critics who have seen it are divided as to whether its lengthy and meticulous recreation of the battles in Cuba and Bolivia is admirable or misjudged, but some complain that the film avoids the least admirable episode of the revolutionary's life – the years after 1959 during which the strict disciplinarian, as Minister of the Interior, oversaw the executions of Castro's opponents.

“I picked the two sections of Che's life that are closed,” Soderbergh said in his own defence. “Cuba is still happening, that story is still being written, Fidel is still around. … Most of his time there, [Che] is being a bureaucrat, so that wasn't as interesting to me.”

He also wasn't interested in Guevara's personal life, which included two wives and five children.

“That was a decision I made early on, because I felt like, you know what, everybody's got a personal life, everybody in that jungle has a personal life. That's not unusual and I don't really care. Everybody gave up something to go and do this. I just didn't feel like that was as big an issue as these larger issues. He is literally, by hand, trying to remake a society, first in Cuba and then in Bolivia. That's bigger than what your spouse is up to.”

Soderbergh allows one scene in the film to tell what needs to be told – he shows Guevara sharing a brief moment with his second wife, Aleida, before he leaves Cuba for Bolivia. “He and his first wife Hilda, that relationship had basically ended before he left Mexico to go to Cuba,” the director said, adding: “The second time, after he married Aleida and had four [more] kids, he could have stayed in Cuba indefinitely and been a rock star. He walked away to do it again, which also makes him unusual.

“There are some great letters he wrote to her, when he was in the Congo [in 1965, shortly before he went to Bolivia]. I guess she had written some letters that were sort of emotional and he writes back saying, ‘You knew what you were getting into. This is it: You marry a revolutionary, this is what you have to deal with.' He's not cold, but he is just saying we can't have this conversation over and over again.”

How movie audiences will react to this often anti-dramatic account of Guevara's battles will be determined in the next few weeks, but Soderbergh has no particular fear of a political backlash against the film in the United States.

“You have to separate the Cuban nationalist lobby that is centred in Miami from the rest of the country,” he said. “The rest of the country doesn't really understand why we still have the embargo. We are trading with China. It's one of those strange circumstances where a very small group of passionate people are dictating the policy of the U.S. government. If you are running for president, you have got to win Florida and you can't win Florida without saying ‘I am for the embargo.'”

Soderbergh argues that the embargo is counterproductive, and that the fastest way to make Cuba more democratic would be to send American tourists there in droves. “When people get a taste of a certain kind of freedom, it is very infectious,” he said. Indeed, it's how revolutions begin.