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Reviewer: Nate Clarke
Tears of the Sun is one of the those movies that while returning home, you can't decide whether to discuss the important political and social issues it raises or to complain about the fact that the heroine's lipstick is always perfectly applied, even after several days in the jungle. Bruce Willis (with his perfectly shaped head) is more than competent to play the part of a special ops commander charged with evacuating a doctor (Monica Bellucci, who of course is beautiful AND exotic) and several missionaries (who of course are old AND wrinkled) from a political nightmare in Nigeria. Understandably, the doctor will not leave her patients to be slaughtered by the approaching horde of rebels, so Willis agrees to take along those that can handle a long voyage to neighboring Cameroon. Thus begins a series of moral dilemmas for Willis. Will he do what is strategically right and evacuate only the Americans? Or will he risk the lives of his soldiers in order to save the several dozen villagers who are along for the journey? Science fiction and fantasy films like The Matrix requires us to suspend our rational logic. Tears of the Sun however, presents itself as a plausible scenario. Given this, there are times in the film when I wanted to stand up and say, "Oh come on, that wouldn't happen like that." Yes, Hollywood needs to dab a bit of glamour into everything, but would a team of highly trained Navy Seals really walk head on into a barrage of bullets? What happened to ducking for cover or hiding behind a tree? This tension between realism and Bruckheimerism is evident throughout the film and compromises the overall feeling of plausibility the film seems to be pursuing. Yet this film is not just about slow-motion action sequences; it reveals to the viewer situations and realities that are often far from our common experience in North America. I would hope that many people watching this film ask themselves if this could really happen. When confronted by real people with real needs, would Western forces just allow death to arrive in the form of a machete? Well, the issue is not "could this happen," but that it did happen. Willis's situation echoes the Rwandan genocide. As the threat of violence escalated, The United Nations began to pull out its peace keepers lest they be attacked by the mobs of Hutus looking for Tutsi blood. A group of Dutch soldiers had turned the campus of a school into a safe haven for threatened Tutsis. However, their position was deemed too perilous by politicians in Europe and they were ordered to evacuate. (Their story is documented in part in a Front Line investigation). I wondered what it would be like to leave behind hundreds of innocents that you knew were about to be slaughtered. Within days of their exit, pictures emerged of the campus, filled with the hacked dead bodies of the Tutsis the Dutch were earlier protecting. One of this film's great attributes is that it places this type of crisis into our conscience and experience. We cannot remain ignorant of this lack of respect for human dignity; this films shoves these actions into our face forcing them into our awareness. The movie is beautifully filmed with lush jungle vistas and dark foreboding vegetation, fairly conventional in regards to character development, and rather predictable (although thankfully there is only a hint of a love story). Where Tears of the Sun shines is that it provides us with a glimpse into the brutal realities many face in Africa. This is not so much a film about the deep turmoil that Bruce Willis must go through in order to arrive at a decision, but rather a good action movie, with a social conscience, that uses Willis's dilemma as a backdrop. Given this, it is frustrating that the film apparently is not allowed to fully explore the moral questions that war creates. It can not decide what to be — a realistic war drama or a sensationalist "Ahnuld" shoot-em-up. One final note about this film: There are some intense scenes of brutality that, while not as graphic as other war films such as We Were Soldiers, may be a bit much for some viewers.
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