Tears
of the Sun Illuminates, Then Plunges Into Darkness
Tears
of the Sun Illuminates, Then Plunges Into Darkness
This is gonna be a tricky review for me, folks, because I think Tears of
the Sun is a good and noble film. However, I also found it to be a maddeningly
flawed film, too, as well as a mis-marketed one.
First, what is good and noble. Directed by Antoine Fuqua of Training
Day fame, Tears of the Sun follows Navy SEAL Lt. A.K. Waters (Bruce
Willis) and his elite team of soldiers as they attempt to extract the beautiful
physician, Dr. Lena Kendricks (Monica Bellucci), from war-torn Nigeria.
The story is fictional, but the film feels immediate, relevant, and harrowing.
Kendricks, an American by marriage, is found tending to the victims of the ongoing
civil war in Nigeria, and she refuses to go with Waters and his men unless they
also take her patients--at least the ones who can still walk. To placate her,
Waters agrees but secretly plans to just take the good doctor back once they
reach the helicopter landing zone several miles of jungle away. Waters, though,
has a dramatic change of heart when during the ensuing flyover, he witnesses
the horribly destroyed village from which they just escaped. He and his men
go back for the frightened, brutalized refugees they left behind and soon finds
themselves trapped behind enemy lines with no military support.
Tears of the Sun dramatizes the plight of a country torn apart by violence
and tyranny. It doesn't matter that the story isn't real. History has proven
time and again that such stories have occurred, and they will continue to occur
as long as the very strong can dominate the very weak. The movie is more about
following your conscience, using power wisely, and the value of human life than
raging gun battles and lighting up foreign countrysides. I commend Fuqua for
taking the more serious route. His goal is to make a film about characters,
dilemmas, about survival.
Unfortunately, he falls short by not actually giving us any characters. Bruce
Willis does a fine job as Waters, but he is so darn impenetrable at times that
we don't know exactly why he is disobeying every--and I mean, EVERY--order his
commanding officer, Captain Bill Rhodes (Tom Skerritt), back at base
is giving him via radio. Why is this time SO different for him than all of the
other times he has performed this same duty? Is it because the doctor is so
hot? Is it because he feels responsibility for leaving behind a hospital full
of wounded refugees just to be slaughtered by the approaching rebels?
Or is it because the movie needed a plot?
The only other personality in the picture that makes a lasting impression is
Bellucci's Kendricks. The Malena star is almost too beautiful for this
kind of down-and-dirty film. But her performance is strong and forceful, and
you can't take your eyes off her. Why Fuqua had her running around and tending
to the outcast with her cleavage hanging out, I'll never know.
Everyone else, as they say in military terms, is expendable. I was shocked by
how little screen time the rest of the SEALs got to develop anything resembling
real characters. If you see this film, I defy you to remember three of the names
in Waters' team. The film has the annoying habit of having several of them come
to the lieutenant and engaging him in this conversation:
SOLDIER: L.T., I don't think we should be doing this. WILLIS: What should we
doing? Abandoning these people? SOLDIER: Yeah, but disobeying orders? I don't
know. WILLIS: Are you in or are you out? SOLDIER: Hey, I'm in.
And they fall back in line! I'm all for discipline, but I'm also all for compelling
drama. This scene plays out at least three different times in the film.
Two more flaws, and then I will have a few choice words for the knuckleheads
who are completely misrepresenting the movie in ads and trailers. One, if you
want an audience to have sympathy for a persecuted population, don't just show
us atrocity after atrocity. Give us characters! Fuqua shows plenty of innocent,
unarmed people being shot by hulking rebel soldiers. He gives us probably a
hundred close-ups of scared, crying, hopeless Nigerian faces. But only a handful
of the refugees--the very people the audience MUST feel for in order for the
movie to work--have any speaking parts whatsoever. And then it's just to say,
"Thank you, dear doctor! Thank you, dear soldier! You have done the right
ting."
And, two, if you want to really dramatize such plight, why make half the movie
about soldiers escorting refugees at tiptoe speed miles and miles through a
darkened jungle? Seriously, I could see the other audience members in the theater
better than I could see the characters in half of this movie. We get an eye
here, a footstep there, and the pace is maddening. In this part of the movie,
he needed to establish the individual personalities. Look at a movie like Platoon
or, heck, even a cheeseball action flick like Predator, and the team
of featured soldiers has AT LEAST six to eight very distinct and very strong
personalities to identify with.
Finally, and I'll stop here, this is not the wall-to-wall action film that the
commercials would have you believe. It's just not. Fuqua didn't make that film,
and again I commend him for that. I would estimate 90 percent of the fireworks
and gunplay you see in the ads now running happens in the FINAL 15 minutes of
this movie. There are great, GREAT fireworks. Fuqua gives us a final sprint
for life by soldiers and civilians alike that is as intense, scary, and ultimately
heartbreaking as anything in last year's We Were Soldiers. But this is
not a war movie, but a mission movie.
I don't know. Maybe I would have liked Tears of the Sun better had I
known going in what the film was going to be like. Again, I reiterate how much
I admire Fuqua for opting to make a movie where he didn't put the action sequences
first and the ideas second. His goal was to make me feel. And on that level,
he failed me.
But he did make me ponder the often-brutal world in which I live. Tears of
the Sun ends with the great Edmund Burke quote: "The only thing
necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
Read into that what you will, my friends.
Tears of the Sun is rated R for violence, brutality, and language.
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