Blood Diamond remains worth watching, especially in its new HD trim and with its added bonus features.
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Warner Bros. usually release their HD DVD and Blu-ray titles simultaneously, but with "The Matrix" and "Blood Diamond," they handled it differently. They released "The Matrix" in HD DVD well in advance of the Blu-ray edition, and they released "Blood Diamond" in Blu-ray several weeks ahead of the HD DVD version. For HD DVD fans, the wait for "Blood Diamond" is well worthwhile, as the HD DVD edition contains an "In-Movie Experience" that should delight anybody interested in movie extras, plus some fancy Internet connections. It makes a good thing even better.
The term "Blood Diamond" refers to several things. First, it refers to any diamond mined during a civil strife and sold to help finance a rebel army (thus, its alternative reference as a conflict or war diamond). Second, it refers to the 2006 Warner Bros. movie of the same name. Third, it refers to a specific diamond in the movie, a rare pink gem of immense value.
The movie did fairly good box office but probably not nearly as well as WB would have liked, given that it cost around $100,000,000 to make and took in about $56,000,000. I have a theory about that. "Blood Diamond" is at once a serious "message" drama and an action thriller, in the process possibly turning off some of the followers of both genres. I have a hunch that many fans of action films prefer that they contain a healthy dose of escapism--at least a touch of fantasy or the preposterous, a Terminator or a Bond--and fewer thematic lessons. But "Blood Diamond" is too moralistic for that. On the other hand, fans of straight drama may not appreciate the sheer volume of violence, fighting, and death in the movie. It's a shame because "Blood Diamond" is at heart a decent movie, and it may have been a case of its trying to do too much. But enough of idle speculation; let's get on with the film.
We have it now on HD DVD, and viewers can easily judge its merits for themselves. Director Edward Zwick ("Last Samurai," "Glory"), who enjoys hanging messages on his big-budget epics, put this one together from recent headlines, and Leonardo DiCaprio (who seems to be in every other big-budget movie these days), the dynamic Djimon Hounsou, and the multitalented Jennifer Connelly star. Ironically, perhaps, it's Zwick's eye for landscape and the actors' dedication to their roles that largely carry the picture, rather than its action or themes.
The fictional plot takes place in 1999 in the very real strife of western Africa's Sierra Leone, where, as the preface tells us, "Civil war rages for control of the diamond fields. Thousands have died and millions have become refuges. None of whom has ever seen a diamond."
The story line involves two men, whose stories begin separately but soon merge. The first is Solomon Vandy (Hounsou), a humble fisherman whose village rebel forces attack, capturing him and his family. They separate them, sending him, his wife, and his daughter to work in various diamond fields and his son to fight in their insurgent army. While in the fields, Solomon finds a rare, pink diamond and buries it, but he's discovered by an overseer just as government troops overrun the fields and arrest everyone. The troops drag Solomon and the overseer off to jail before either of them can retrieve the diamond.
The other man is Danny Archer (DiCaprio), an ex-mercenary turned gun runner and diamond smuggler who will work for anybody who pays him enough. The government has just arrested him for trying to transport gems out of the country illegally, and they've thrown him into the same jail as Solomon and the overseer. It's here that Danny learns of Solomon's diamond. With his connections, Danny gets himself and Solomon released; then he quickly strikes a deal with the fellow: Danny will help Solomon find his family if Solomon will help Danny get his hands on the diamond and share it with him. Danny needs the money to pay back a crooked colonel (Arnold Vosloo) because of a smuggling deal that fell through, and Solomon just wants his family back.
From this point on, about a half an hour into the film, the story turns into a pretty straightforward adventure yarn, complete with a requisite pretty girl. In this case, the girl is Maddy Bowen (Connelly), an American journalist working on a story to expose the illicit blood-diamond trade in Sierra Leone. She's determined to get information from Danny, and Danny is not above using her to get what he needs to return to the diamond fields and uncover Solomon's pink diamond.
In the film the rebels are selling their diamonds illegally to a big, supposedly respectable diamond firm, the fictional Van De Kaap Diamond Company, a depiction of scandal that so upset the real De Beers diamond company that they protested the motion picture.
Zwick's strengths are in juxtaposing the extreme beauty of Sierra Leone (with gorgeous cinematography by Eduardo Serra) with the extreme nature of the violence there at the time. The movie carries an R rating for the brutality of the killings, which in the film could not have approached the ferocity of the real-life deaths. Still, the bloodshed the movie depicts is rampant, reminding us once again how little value so many people all over the world have placed on human life, whether in Africa, Iraq, America, Nazi Germany, or the Roman Empire. Things never change where money, power, and corruption are concerned.
Moreover, the acting is first-rate. DiCaprio is convincing as the amoral, self-styled soldier-of-fortune. Connelly is convincing as the dedicated reporter who wants to make a difference in the world by exposing injustice. And Hounsou is best of all as a father who will go to any means to get his family back. He should have won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, but I suppose a nomination is honor enough.
The problem is that beyond the scenery and the fine acting, the plot is rather threadbare and the characterizations somewhat clichéd. We've seen before the unprincipled antihero who slowly learns that there is more to life than his own little self, or perhaps you've forgotten "Casablanca"? And we've already seen the selfless crusader devoted to saving the world, as well as the father willing to give his life for his family. These are noble people with noble causes, to be sure, but they are hardly original.
Then, there's the question of the film's length. At nearly two-and-a-half hours, it's far too long for its subject matter, a concern it shares with many other movies these days. Long is sometimes good, sometimes even better; and long is also sometimes just...long. Here, the pace flagged far too often for the film to keep my attention fully throughout.
What's more, Zwick's vision outpaces his narrative. Despite the movie's highfalutin' messages about greed, selfishness, the exploitation of the masses, the shame of child armies, our need for greater consumer awareness in buying goods that come at the price of human lives, and Man's general inhumanity to Man, we're mostly just getting stock characters acting out a stock melodrama. Again, while Zwick's heart is in the right place, he tends to forget how his excessive moralizing is losing his audience along the way.
The movie's last thirty minutes or so are the most gripping, although Zwick even drags this out too far. "Blood Diamond" is a film I enjoyed watching in part, but it's a film that kept making me wish had been better.
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