Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Okay... it’s official. I want to see this film now. People are seeing it all over the place, and the word is damn good. I like the trailer. I like the casting. I want to see this. I hear a certain large red webmaster may have seen and enjoyed this film enormously, to the point of incontinence... and that makes me eager to see it as soon as possible... just as long as I don’t have to sit in the seat Grande Rojo was in...
Here’s “Morgan Ironwolf” one POV on Phil Alden Robinson’s thriller:
Hey Harry, Morgan Ironwolf here. I had the pleasure tonight to view a screening of The Sum of All Fears here in Houston, TX. It was fantastic, go see it.
Hopefully when you see it, it will have credits and be in the right order. They warned us before we saw it but there was a 15 min portion of the film that was repeated in the middle of the film, it had the exact same scenes, but he characters were different. it was cool to see the scene just a little different as if you were the director watching your dailies. Plus it gave us a chance to run to the head and relieve ourselves. I am a huge Morgan Freeman and Ben “hoof-leck” fan, and they both turned in great performances. This was the fourth movie to feature Tom Clancy’s character, Jack Ryan, but with Affleck starring instead of Han Solo, er I mean Harrison Ford. In this movie however, Jack is young and unmarried, posing as a historian working for a think tank in Baltimore. He of course secretly works for the CIA and spends his time spying on the Kremlin from D.C. and writing briefs laying out hypotheticals about the leaders who really control the post-Soviet Union Russian Federation and how they might dictate the shape of things to come. When his brief comes up close to the mark, he again is drawn unwittingly to the
center of the action and becomes an American James Bond, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance.
One thing I really liked about this film was that is was very convincing. This film however didn’t talk down to the audience or try to cut corners by giving an actor a hammy overblown line pandering to Patriotism designed to make every redneck in the audience yell “Hell Yeah!” The film just dishes out the “What if’s” and after 9-11, the terrible events in this film will unfortunately be seen as very probable.
Fears was directed by Phil Alden Robinson, of Sneakers and Field of Dreams fame. He made the action sequences very believable, although I didn’t care for the constant aerial photos with every city change, he did some breathtaking cinematography. His shot of Red Square made from a crow’s-eye-view cast the normally bustling Red Square as dark, bleak and oddly desolate. Snow covered abandoned streets lined with WW II cannons and silent deserted buildings seem to be unguarded and unwatched, until a trio of sedans rush through the square breaking the quiet stillness, speeding in a hell of a hurry to who knows where? A lone Russian Solider who was not apparent before snaps to attention in a salute to the vehicles as they pass. The camera angle makes the cars look like giant black cigar boxes following each other at a constant pace until they move away one by one and the definition of the roof and back of the sedans betray their true shape.
My favorite character of the movie, James Cromwell also turned in a great performance as the US President, and was yet another reason to see the film. It was a great time, don’t miss it.
Morgan out.
Then an old spy of ours, SHREVIE, weighed in:
Hey, Harry!
Shrevie here.
Pleased to send in another review, after my report last August on The Royal Tennenbaums (http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=9798).
Earlier this evening I attended an early screening of Paramount's new Jack Ryan installment, The Sum Of All Fears, directed by Phil Alden Robinson from a script by Paul Attanasio & Daniel Pyne (based on the Tom Clancy novel), and starring Ben Affleck, Morgan Freeman, James Cromwell, Live Shrieber, Phillip Baker Hall and Alan Bates.
The color timing, sound, and some F/X were still incomplete but it was watchable. You all know the basics of the plot if you've seen the trailer (which gives away the whole movie) so I'll cut to the chase.
The Sum Of All Fears is basically The Hunt For Red October with higher stakes. Instead of Jack Ryan, a CIA analyst with no real field experience trying to convince the U.S. government that a Russian nuclear sub means us no harm because he "knows" that captain, we have Jack Ryan (Affleck), a young CIA analyst with no real field experience trying to convince the U.S. government that a new Russian president means us no harm because he "knows" him. Even when some shady Eurotrash types get their hands on a 25-year-old nuclear bomb and secretly set it off in the Russians' name. Basically it's no harder to figure out than The Phantom Menace, kids.
Now this is a difficult movie for me to review because it is impossible to separate it's story from the events that hit us last September and have escalated war and the threat of even worse here and throughout the world. I realize the filmmakers couldn't have known what was going to happen on our soil in New York and the Pentagon. And I know a movie is a piece of entertainment, not a foreign policy report. But for me, seeing this movie raised the question, "What IS it's purpose?" This movie is a thriller. Not a great one, but a decent one. A thriller is designed to involve us in events we can understand through characters we can empathize with. In this case, the character of Jack Ryan is introduced with clarity and charming detail while we learn about several fact-based situations involving instability in the middle east, the considerable amount of active nuclear weapons still maintained by Russia and the U.S. despite the demise of the cold war, and the terrifying existence of countless rogue warheads easily scattered and transported by God-knows-who throughout the world. We all recognize all this information from the news and say to ourselves, "Gee, that's all true. What could happen as a result of all of this?" The movie then takes the next logical (narrative) step and shows us a scenario in which a nuclear explosion occurs in a major U.S. city.
Now comes the paradox. We all saw first-hand, in all our cities what it looks like when three planes crash into several buildings. ...The whole country shut down. People in bars were screaming long-buried prejudices. The military took over the streets and the skies (I live in New York City so forgive my biased point of view). The Sum Of All Fears depicts a nuclear attack. ...A NUCLEAR attack! And it does what it can to scare the bejeesus out of it's audience. "This could happen!" it is telling us. And yet it
feels both too conservative to be realistic and too horrifying to be entertaining (even with what I assume was considerably toned-down editing, post 9/11). So which is it? A realistic depiction of a possible holocaust? Or a nail-biting popcorn movie? It couldn't decide and my guess is it's impossible to do both.
Ryan (being of course, the only person in the world who can think straight, as the President and his team scream at each other like teenagers) tries to get to the Pentagon and prevent a full-scale retaliatory war. But it seemed so damn easy (hours after a mushroom cloud looms over the eastern seaboard, the Pentagon remains unguarded and Ryan gets in by swiping an I.D. card!), the depiction of a minor apocalypse looks relatively tame and small-scale (reminded me of Deep Impact), and the smug, cutsey ending left me feeling America had taken the whole thing pretty well, like an astronaut had been killed or something.
I couldn't help but wonder that if The Sum Of All Fears had been made after September 11th, it may have informed the filmmakers and Affleck's lightweight performance for the better (or worse as the case may be). As it is, it just feels like a scary movie parasitically preying on the sum of our very real fears to score at the box office. And I don't buy the excuse that it was innocently made before 9/11. What was it's purpose THEN, when, according to this movie, the threat was the same? In an age when Tom Clancy
himself was on CNN within an hour of the World Trade Center's destruction, giving his expert opinion, why is two hours of well-paced terrorism considered entertainment?
Just thought someone might want something more than, "It sucked." or "It rocked."
---Shrevie, New York City, 2002
Okay... so there are definitely very different POV’s on how this works so far. All the more reason I’m dying to see it.
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