My thumb is pointing down for Antoine Fuqua’s (
”
Training Day
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)
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Tears of the Sun
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, but that doesn’t mean a lot of audiences won’t like it.
My thumb is pointing down for Antoine Fuqua’s (“Training Day”) “Tears of the Sun”, but that doesn’t mean a lot of audiences won’t like it.
The film uses propaganda most effectively to promote the idea of American soldiers using their power around the world only for good ends. That may be debatable, but most war films use that theory to tell action stoies that glorify battle, that war is a necessary evil.
Unfortunately, “Tears of the Sun” wallows in melodramatics, overblown action and dialogue, and an unnerving, dramatic score to stir our emotions. When Bruce Willis and his band of Navy Seals head into Nigeria to rescue a medical doctor and some nuns, I half-expected angels from the heavens to lead them into battle. The film certainly manipulates your emotions, much in the way John Wayne’s war films do. The Americans are heroic and incapable of losing their minds to the logic of war.
The story clearly establishes boundaries as to who the good guys and bad guys of the story are, which is OK, but the African warlords of the film come off as irrational, violent thugs bent on blood lust toward Americans and anyone who doesn’t believe in them. They’re presented as objects of scorn, as unthinking, uncaring murderers. This is not to say that some of the independent armies of Nigeria aren’t like the ones depicted in “Tears of the Sun,” it’s just that the way they’re represented is very stereotypical and general.
The story is presented as a rescue scenario, but it really exists to show how compassionate and heroic our troops are. Lt. A.K. Waters (Bruce Willis, who’s very good here) is the commander of a seven-man Navy Seal team, and his Navy Captain (Tom Skerritt, who couldn’t be further removed from his “M.A.S.H.” role) gives the Waters his newest mission: Rescue Dr. Lena Kendricks (Monica Bellucci, “Irreversible”), a priest and some nuns from a Catholic mission in the jungles of Nigeria. It seems that a warring tribe is engaged in ethnic cleansing, murdering and wreaking havoc on all who don’t subscribe to their ethnic makeup. So it’s Willis and his team to the rescue.
In an exciting opening scene after the orders are issued, Waters and his band of fighters emerge from a river undetected after jumping out of a military aircraft in the pitch black night. Waters grabs the first person he sees, tells her he’s not there to hurt her, and asks her to find Dr. Kendricks. After Kendricks arrives, she is told that she and the nuns have 30 minutes to pack their things and be ready to leave because the enemy is nearby. We get the usual sermon that those who choose to stay behind certainly will be executed, but the priest and nuns choose to stay.
After packing up, Dr. Kendrics tells Waters that she won’t go if she can’t bring along the 50 or so refugees as well. In an insane, misguided plot twist, Waters agrees. This immediately gets the film in hot water, because anyone who knows the military at all knows that Navy Seals do not deviate from the mission, certainly not at the discretion of a civilian.
Navy Seals are taught to move without compassion or thought; their instincts need to move them through the mission without thinking or they’re certainly dead.
While on the 30 kilometer trek to the border of Camaroon, where American choppers are waiting for them, the tribal army tracks Waters and the refugees, hoping to catch them when they are resting. They get out of one situation after another, only to find themselves surrounded by the film’s end. I suppose the main theme of the story is that Waters, Willis’ character, changes from an uncaring military man to one of extreme compassion, making him a new kind of American hero, one for the 21st century.
“Tears of the Sun” is an old-fashioned, patriotic war film that wouldn’t be politically out of place in the 1940s or ’50s, when it was important for movie art to reflect the rightness of the allies’ position as it relates to stamping out Nazism or Facism in World War II. But I think we should have evolved since then, and our war films should be as complex and thought-provoking as the new world we live in.
TEARS OF THE SUN. Directed by Antoine Fuqua. Written by Alex Lasker and Patrick Cirillo. With Bruce Willis, Monica Bellucci, and Tom Skerrit. Rated R (war violence and language). 118 minutes. Now playing at Bay Area theaters.
