Almost great. So close.

Rating: 7/10 (20 August 2008)

Solomon Vandy (Djimon Honsou) is a local fisherman in 1990s Sierra-Leone, whose son Dia Vandy (Kagiso Kuypers) has been captured by the RUF. Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a Rhodesian diamond smuggler coming slowly to terms with the corruptive nature of his enterprise. Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly) is a maverick American journalist striving to expose the war's atrocities and dodging no punches in doing so. Their lives thrown together by the traumas of the nation, they embark on a harrowing odyssey that takes them from one side of the spectrum to the other, from the war's most rudimentary horrors to the corporate diamond dealers working behind the curtains, Bowen in search of the mother-lode story, Archer in search of the mother-lode diamond, and Vandy in search of his son, whom the rebels have turned into a soldier.
The film dives headfirst into the horrors of the conflict, but does so responsibly, without ever losing its sense of direction. The plot, while bordering on convolution, makes adequate use of all its characters, and manages to address nearly all of the war's most prominent attributes without feeling forced or unnatural.
On a visceral level, the film fares especially well. The battle scenes are superbly shot, the use of color is amazing, and the machine gun fire is so encompassing that it went on rattling in my head a full three hours after I walked out of the theater. Hollywood, in its anti-war persuasion, has a long-standing tradition of removing all the glamour and virtue from the battlefield, but the one thing it hasn't transplanted, at least not measurably, is war itself. The class of conflict we see in Blood Diamond  far from the battlefield, far from the domain of soldiers and trained professionals, and far, even, from the needs and ideals of the people in its shadow  is, for the most part, uncharted territory. In their chaos, brutality, and total lack of redemption, Zwick's battle sequences show us just how low civil conflict can sink, to a greater extent than any other movie I can think of. The scenes depicting the child soldiers and their mental conditioning are of a piece all their own, and can't be praised enough.
Yet for all its merits, there's still something rotten at the heart of the movie, and it has something to do with the dynamic between Archer and Vandy, Archer dominant, Vandy subservient. It's Archer who leads the operation, Archer who makes all the crucial decisions, Archer who saves the day whenever the going gets tough, and Vandy who wanders dutifully behind, distinguishing himself only by his way of his blunders.
And that's just the beginning.
At one point, the two pilgrims express their bewilderment at the savagery and frequency of African conflicts. It's a perfect opportunity to pose questions about the ongoing effects of European colonialism, but Zwick chooses instead to leave the question unanswered, and even goes a little in the opposite direction, suggesting that the African psychology might be inherently violent.
But it's not the implied racism of these details that bothers me so much as their distraction from what the movie should inherently be about  the Sierra Leonians and their struggle for survival. It's their future at stake. Their nation. Their diamonds. Their war. As such, it should be their story that we're focusing on, but instead, we get the story of an outsider, and experience the war from his point-of-view. Danny Archer is, beyond doubt, an interesting figure, and so is Maddy Bowen, if somewhat woodenly portrayed. We definitely want them in the movie, but we want them in supporting roles, not prancing about in the foreground. The core of the story should be Vandy's search for his son, not Archer's search for redemption. Maybe then the film would do a better job of emulating the resilience and fortitude of the African people, and not just the horror and bloodshed that is all too often a feature of their lives.