Warlord

Wednesday September 21, 2005 - 9:56AM EDT

The below post is actually from yesterday. I just forgot to put it up from notepad.

I saw the movie Lord of War. It was different. It was almost like a parable. It seemed kind of like a documentary because of the subject matter. It did use the typical formulaic elements of your standard screenplay but not to the same end. There was a sense of realism to the subject matter. Because although everything was fictionalized, everything that went on felt like it could and is happening in real life. Nothing about it seemed faked or exagerated. It wasn't a story with a hard begining and end. It seemed more like a slice out of the continuim of the real world. I don't know why more attention wasn't paid to it. I really haven't seen a more like that at all. The story was secondary to what it was trying to tell us and it worked nicely. But it wasn't trying to tell us something with to much of a biased towards one side. It seemed like a completely unbiased reflection of what goes on for real. There was no real ending to the movie. It sort of just cut away and you felt as if the movie continued on without someone watching. You'd be a fool to call anything in this movie into question. Although it is pure fiction you can't say the picture it paints is false. Because you can read about what it shows in the paper everyday. It is very light on the political partisanship too. In fact there is no partisanship at all. Which makes its message stronger. It presents the story in a matter of fact way. Even the main character when pressed for a reason why he does what he does gives the most simple banal answer, "I'm good at it". I've heard the words geopolitical satire, political thriller describe this movie. I wouldn't go that far to describe it. I've also read some reviews that say the plot and characters are light. They are, but it works because the message is so heavy. Our minds don't need to burdened by deep characters and heavy plot. The focus should be the message. The point is to not think about the feelings and plight of the main character but the plight of the world in what this movie shows. I think those who don't like the movie would focus on the story and are expecting something along the lines of your typical political thriller or action movie. But this movie is different. I see it as kind of a fictionalized documentary. This movie isn't like Tears of the Sun or Beyond Borders. Those movies attempted strong heavy plots where the focus was the characters set against the backdrop of geopolitical plight. The main component of Lord of War is the plight. The story is the background, something to move along the action and keep us interested in studying the gears of gunrunning. When I read other reviews of this I get the sense reviewers are trying to place the movie into the normal categories and they can't therefore they don't like it. Some criticize that the movie doesn't go deep enough into the morality of the message. In other words it doesn't take a side. Which I think was a perfect thing to do. Surely its message is that this stuff is horrible but it doesn't make a herculean effort to place blame specifically on anyone. It also doesn't try to provide solutions. It is informational in its approach.

Andrew Niccol does an admirable job of showing us violence of the world we live in but doesn’t give us any reason to care. - full article

Above is the final line from a movie review. It was from a reviewer who didn't like the movie that much. The reviewer is looking for something to fit the mold and doesn't find it. The reviewer does make a curiously insightful comment about it working better as a documentary though. The last line is kind of disturbing to see written. Read it again, then read the whole review. You can see that the comment should be put in the context of a screenplay analysis. But then again, why are we waiting for someone to give us a reason to care about the violence of the world? Does the reviewer know what they are writting? In the assement of the movie I feel as if this person missed the point completely. They are looking for something else, something cookie cutter and can't find it.

Those watching this movie and looking for the typical movie exagerated fair aren't going to find it. And that is what makes it so real. We can pretend that our interactions with people are deep but the majority of what we do on a daily basis is so utterly shallow it is pathetic. Man I'm bored.