Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
"The Sum of All Fears" pretends to be a serious exploration of nuclear terrorism, but it's really nothing more than warmed-over Cold War paranoia.
May 31, 2002 | After Sept. 11, magazine and newspaper editors and the producers of TV and radio talk shows were obscenely eager to get film critics and movie industry insiders to pontificate on how the terrorist attacks would change movies. Editors and producers, whose jobs depend on sniffing out trends, have never understood that trends are not the same thing as real change. Focused on increasing readership and ratings, they want to react to events as they happen. Thought is secondary.
It didn't matter that movie production and release schedules are decided months in advance and that we would still be seeing movies that had been made or begun before Sept. 11 for a year or so after the event. They don't want to know that it sometimes takes months, or even years, for changes and the reasons behind those changes to become apparent. The people who run the print and broadcast media wanted sage-sounding "think pieces" before the dust had even settled in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania. I know of one editor who decided that "Monsters, Inc.," "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" and "The Lord of the Rings" proved that Hollywood was now retreating into comforting fantasy in response. She wasn't deterred by the fact that all three of those movies had been completed before the terrorist attacks.
That's why the smartest people asked to prognosticate on how Sept. 11 would change movies admitted they didn't know -- or just didn't say anything. They realized that this event was too serious to turn yourself into another talking head over (or writing head, if that makes any sense). If it's possible to say that anything has changed at this early date, it's not so much movies as the spin around them. When Warner Bros. decided to postpone the release of Collateral Damage," in which a firefighter goes after the terrorists who have killed his family, the star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, went on talk shows to support the studio's decision, saying it wasn't the right time for people to see the movie. By the time the movie was finally released in early spring, Schwarzenegger had switched modes, telling interviewers that audiences wanted to see Americans triumphing over terrorism.
Spin is the reason that a stiff, dour, unimaginative spy snoozer like "The Sum of All Fears," the latest installment of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan thrillers, is being sold as a serious and "timely" piece of filmmaking. That's how it appeared to be taken by some of my colleagues at a New York press screening last week, and I can only guess that, for them, it touched a nerve. But if there's anything disturbing about "The Sum of All Fears," it's how the same old crap can achieve topical cachet.
"The Sum of All Fears"
Directed by Phil Alden Robinson
Starring Ben Affleck, Morgan Freeman, James Cromwell, Liev Schreiber, Alan Bates
"The Sum of All Fears" deals with a plot by terrorists to pit America and Russia against each other and, with the superpowers in shambles, step in and take over. It's a device familiar from previous spy pictures and espionage fiction. And the fact that Sept. 11 happened doesn't mean that it need never be employed again. Nobody is now likely to watch a 007 movie where Bond is working to defeat some supervillain's scheme for world domination and feel that it's uncomfortably close to real events. At the time I saw "The Sum of All Fears" I was happily reading one of Peter O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise thrillers in which terrorists plot to blow up the Golden Gate Bridge at rush hour. There was nothing in the book's good-guys-vs.-bad-guys plot that now felt callous.
I'd never argue that entertainments or commercial pictures can't deal with serious issues. (The best contemporary crime fiction addresses the question of how people choose to live in a world defined by violence. And the best espionage writers -- Eric Ambler, Geoffrey Household, John le Carré and, currently, Alan Furst and Joseph Kanon -- manage, within their entertainments, to give a sense of the complexities and contingencies of international conflict.)
But when reality has outstripped fiction, a movie that claims to be working above the level of a mere thriller -- a movie that trades in images of mass destruction -- now needs to be operating at the highest possible level if it's going to be something besides exploitation.
About an hour into the picture, the terrorists, a group of fascists working under the direction of their Nazi leader (played by Alan Bates), detonate a nuclear bomb in the middle of a Baltimore football stadium. The disaster images come suddenly and quickly: glass being blown out in a hospital, a landscape being reduced to dust, a helicopter being jolted out of the sky by shock waves. The director, Phil Alden Robinson ("Field of Dreams"), doesn't linger on them. He doesn't pump up the destruction with dramatic music. The only injured we see come later, in a few brief scenes in hospitals and first-aid tents. Robinson's approach is tasteful, but only as tasteful as a thoroughly unconscionable piece of moviemaking can be.
"The Sum of All Fears" isn't a serious attempt to deal with our vulnerability to terrorism, or to address how established channels of power can bring us to the brink. It's the same damn Tom Clancy picture that's been churned out since "The Hunt for Red October," as humorless and gray and dour as its predecessors. There are good actors everywhere you look in "The Sum of All Fears": Alan Bates, Colm Feore, Ciarán Hinds, Philip Baker Hall, Ron Rifkin, James Cromwell, Bruce McGill, Lisa Gay Hamilton. But we might as well be watching Lloyd Nolan or Whit Bissell or any number of bland, anonymous character actors who populated military and sci-fi films of the '50s and '60s. (I guess Hal Holbrook was otherwise engaged.)
