Tears of the Sun

You know I “accidentally” put this movie on our queue, I think. I was thinking hey didn’t this get pretty good reviews? and put it on our list. See what I think happened was I saw “Tears of the Sun” and thought “The Thin Red Line,” which was more or less fairly well-received. Turns out, “Tears of the Sun” is sort of, well, not.

It’s not a complete waste though, because it does have some redeeming qualities. None of these, however, are Bruce Willis. Hey it’s not like he sucked up the screen too bad, but I’m just saying, it’s a Bruce Willis performance, not a Morgan Freeman performance. No, the redeeming qualities come by way of the realities of war; seeing the atrocities that man brings upon other man. It really makes you ponder the very nature of your fellow man; are we inherently good? You’d like to imagine so, but seeing what we do in the name of “war” or “following orders” is maddening.

Hey look, I know it’s just a Hollywood movie, but it’s based on events, you know? And it doesn’t help that the opening sequence is news footage of unarmed people being gunned down in the streets.

I wish we had more autonomy to act right. What I mean is, the basic premise of this movie is that a leader of a tactical unit that’s pulling a select few American ambassadors out has a bout of conscience in the middle of the mission and decides he needs to help out the natives who are being “ethnically cleansed” in Nigeria. He decides to “abandon” the mission and instead of helping one white woman, helps everyone as much as possible. The rest of the movie is pretty dumb (for instance: they airlifted half of the people at first, but then we find out that a wanted prince is still with the other half and they’re hunting him down? Duh, should have put him on the airlifted chopper, perahps? WTF?), but I don’t think they wanted to do much except show how sick we humans can be to other humans without stopping to ask “why” at least occasionally, and to that end it succeeded.

But let’s be honest: when you set the bar at Palin Height, you really have no excuse for not clearing it, you know? Yeah I’d say that overall, the movie itself earned it’s 34% rating on rotten tomatoes. The message, however, did a fair bit better than that. But maybe that’s just because issues of humanity touch me more than others, who knows. I question this stuff frequently as-is, so maybe I’m primed on questions of the Human Condition.

Don’t watch this movie. If you want to question humanity and still see a decent war flick, do what I meant to do and rent The Thin Red Line. Or Saving Private Ryan. You’ll be better off. Unless you just adore Bruce Willis, but really, what’s that? All ONE of us?