Hey folks, Harry here... From the trailers to just about everyone I know and have heard from... SUM OF ALL FEARS seems to be working pretty good. Lansing at Paramount has done a very good thing in following through with this film instead of placating the 'sensitives' that would remove this sort of material. I have a great deal of hope for this one. Here's the latest report...
Hi Harry. Saw a test screening of The Sum of All Fears in Pasadena this week, and it's taken me this long to put my thoughts in order. First of all, it's an amazing film. Even though they changed quite a bit from the book, it feels more like a Tim Clancy film than any of the previous ones. In the first half hour or forty-five minutes or so, a lot of different characters and places and stories are introduced, and the movie slowly at first starts to bring all these different parts together, and about halfway through, when all hell breaks loose, the movie just races from that point on. It's really exciting, and the tension was almost unbearable.
It's extremely topical, and everyone I talked to afterwards agreed this is a very valuable film for today, because it's just different enough from the headlines (I'm happy as can be that the bad guys aren't Arabs because it would have made the whole thing much too close for comfort) for us to watch and learn something from. The movie is not about an act of terrorism, it's about the reaction to terrorism: what do you do, how do you respond?
It's a very smart story, with so many complications and so many things just mentioned once that you really have to pay attention to get it all, and I'm sure I missed a bunch. Maybe it was the unfinished sound track, but I definitely want to see it again to see what I missed.
The acting is excellent. Ben Affleck starts off playing the charming young guy we've seen him do before, and then he gets thrown into very difficult situations where he has to sink or swim. I find it so much more interesting to see a character who isn't an action superhero have to handle situations like that. It's pretty clear they decided to make a different kind of action film - a smarter one, in which the action isn't made pretty or romanticized. In fact, there's a brutal fight that Jack gets into late in the film that results in nothing. The point being that violence doesn't allow Jack to solve the problem: information does, and that's one of the main points of the movie. Morgan Freeman is amazing (as always), the President (the farmer from Babe) and all his advisors show us something we don't often get to see: what it must really be like when the top guys get together and they don't have a clue as to what's going on. At the beginning of the film, they have a practice! exercise in which everything goes smoothly and orderly. Then, when they have to deal with the real thing, we see what it must really be like. Not enough information, people's nerves getting frayed, tempers flaring, confusion. Really good stuff.
I didn't recognize the Russian President, but he was really interesting. Charismatic. Live Schrieber is terrific as John Clark, and Jack's girlfriend is wonderful: beautiful and funny.
There's more humor in this film than the previous ones (in the first half, anyway), and it's more human because of it.
The terrorist attack is handled with as much tact as possible. They don't rub your noses in gore and bloodshed, but they make it shocking and disturbing with as little actual footage as possible. I really appreciated that. They don't try to get our rocks off with violence.
The three of us who went to this screening haven't stopped talking about it yet, and I can't wait to see the finished version.
