Blood Diamond

Yesterday I do something I very rarely do except on weekends - stay up till 1 AM watching a movie. Blood Diamond was one of those movies I wasn't going to watch, but then the preview won me over. Now having seen it, it was worth only getting 5 1/2 hours of sleep for. For a quick summary before the movie spoilers start, the plot revolves around Solomon Vandy, who is kidnapped by rebels and forced to work in a diamond mine - where he finds a huge diamond, the ticket for freedom for his family. He hides it just as the government sweeps in and captures him and the rebels, one of whom saw him with the diamond. Long story short, a South African diamond smuggler, Danny Archer, find out about the diamond and persuades Solomon that he'll help him find his family...and the diamond. Along they way they meet up with a journalist who wants to get the story out of Archer about conflict diamonds (diamonds sold by rebels in order to buy weapons).

Maybe I just missed it, but I had NO idea where the action was taking place. Turns out it was Sierra Leone, during their civil war in the mid-90's. (Guess if I knew my African geography I'd have know that was next to Liberia, which was mentioned frequently.)

Okay, now on to what I thought about it. Blood Diamond is probably the best Hollywood movie I've seen about Africa; it didn't have s Western-centric feel that others do. It was especially interesting having a white South African and a black Sierra Leonan together, with their different experiences but same African roots. The only American character in the movie was the journalist, and she was dealing with the issues one might expect - there are atrocities happening here, but how can I write about it so it doesn't go in one ear and out the other back home? Shock value has no value anymore.

There was a lot of violence, but not as gory as I was expecting; consistently, it wasn't there for shock so much as realism. The part of the story that got to me most, actually, revolved around the violence. Watching the rebels coming in to the capital to burn and kill and loot made me think, "Mogadishu...this sort of thing is happening in Somalia right now." Pretty chilling thought. But the strongest part of the movie for me was how the rebels took Solomon's son (hoping to use him to get back the diamond) and did their best to teach him to hate his father and to be a killer...at the age of 11 or so. This very thing is going on in Northern Uganda, in the Sudan, in many other places (not just in Africa). Children are truly forced to be murderers. I've never seen or heard a better example of how this system works; that alone is worth watching Blood Diamond for, in all its unpleasant details.

Other tough issues the movie brought up: what is an African to think of violence in Africa, and where's God in all this? The end isn't overtly Christian by any means, but its nature is: there's redemption, peace, and hope in individual lives (even if they don't all have a "happy" ending) and that's the hope of nations being changed too someday, isn't it?

Anyway, good movie. Even the love story (which didn't take up too much of it) is good and doesn't interfere with the plot but rather works with it. It was a real story, not just something set in Africa.