Tears Of The Sun (2003)
Tears of the Sun is one of those
films you don’t mind seeing every once in a while. Though standard Hollywood
fare, it manages to glorify the white heroes with a pleasant minimum of flag
waving. The reoccurring theme of white people needing to help black people
doesn’t seem patronizing to this writer as the current state in Africa is
screaming for help in all directions.
The film is set in Nigeria and deals
with the SEAL-aided evacuation of a mission lying in the path of a bloody coup.
It seems unnecessary to include the word “bloody” here as bloodless coups
are a figment of the most naïve imagination. Needless to say, the film paints a
very grim picture of Africa but it is, unfortunately, inescapable. Africa is not
set to explode, it is a fire that never went out. Hundreds of years of
Imperialism have robbed Africa’s cultures of the time needed to cultivate the idea
of Democracy as opposed to the Pepsi commercial desire for it. Tribal animosity
kept at bay by British, French, and Dutch rifles begins to flare and the rest
becomes sound bites on CNN, provided the genocidal bodycount is high enough.
Books like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart highlight the sources
where Robert D. Kaplan’s The Coming Anarchy concentrates on the
aftermath and its future. In short, Africa is burning.
Sent headlong into the flames are Bruce
Willis and his SEAL Team. Complete with a Token Black Guy, the Mohawk sporting
wildman, and the band-aids for everyone medic, Willis’ team is sent to extract
a “package”, an American-by-marriage doctor who runs a jungle hospice. The
doctor, a “brilliant bitch”, is played wonderfully by the lovely and
talented Monica Belluci. She refuses to leave the mission without her
“people”, the dozens of locals who staff and inhabit the mission. Willis’
CO (Tom Skerrit as a Naval Officer, again), insists that Dr. Kendricks be
extricated safely at any cost, leading Willis into a life changing decision
which sends him off into the African jungle with a small group of terrified
refugees. Imagine Battlestar Galactica with machete wielding Cylons.
Bruce Willis may seem a bit old to be an
on-the-ground SEAL Team commander but his haggard, aged appearance is essential
to his character. The bit players and extras in the movie are drawn from a group
of actual refugees from Sudan which lends a dark realism to the movies tone.
The movie is supposed to be about the
rebirth of the human spirit deep in the heart of darkness and nearly succeeds
were it not for the fact that there are some places on Earth that savagely
massacre clichéd ideas like “a triumph of the spirit.”
Canadian writer, Brian Fawcett, in a
less than veiled attack on Roland Joffé’s The Killing Fields, warned
against making movies about genocide. His concern stems from a fear that such
re-enactment of violence “will merely be titillating” to today’s jaded
youth.
I am reminded of the argument between
Bill Maher and Jack Hannah over the existence of zoos. Maher, PETA’s latest
human megaphone, saw zoos as inhumane where Hannah believed that their
educational value generated interest in hitherto unknown animals and that alone
justified their existence. I don’t know. I do know that I liked The Killing
Fields and it spurred in me an interest in a dark corner of human history
unknown to me at that time. That interest and an investigation the Khmer Rouge
became a driving force behind my insistence that history be heeded and
remembered. One must be careful thought not to fall into Braveheart-ism
and view entertainment as history. Any introduction, however, to thoughts of
history and humanity is welcome in my books.
Although it is difficult to watch in
places, I would recommend Tears of the Sun to everyone. I don’t see it
as devaluing or commercializing human suffering.
Hudson Hawk didn’t turn people
on to stopping the wave of art theft in recent years. Likewise, Die Hard
and its progeny will never bring a grassroots end to terrorism. But Tears of
the Sun, as painful as it is, may tune us living in our glass houses to the
plight and suffering of a people whose history in written in their own blood.
Baron's Six Shooter…
5 ½ slugs outta 6.
by Baron Cameron (2005)
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