diamonds are a warlord's best friend

Rating: 8/10 (24 March 2007)

Diamonds. For years they have been treated as exotic and glamorous. Maybe they are the type of things worn by high society, but the story of how they ended up on the market is one of the ugliest. "Blood Diamond" tells the story of several people whose lives cross due to the 1990s civil war in Sierra Leone. It begins when fisherman Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou) is walking his son Dia to school, when the rebels attack them. The rebels set about turning Dia into a child soldier while making Solomon mine diamonds that they use to finance their war. But Solomon manages to escape.
Meanwhile, there's Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio), an amoral jack-of-all-trades from South Africa looking to make a few bucks off of the diamonds coming from Sierra Leone. While in Sierra Leone, he meets American reporter Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly), tired of having to report on pap when there's a civil war going on in the country. But when the rebels start closing in on the capital, Solomon, Danny and Maddy have to flee together. As time passes and they look for Solomon's son, the three of them are forced to reconsider their loyalties to various causes.
Aside from showing the brutality inherent in Sierra Leone's civil war, the movie gives you a sense of how, in the midst of a civil war, the common people probably view the revolutionaries as no different from the dictatorship; Sierra Leone's government was pretty vile, but the rebels became just as bad. If the movie has any problem, it's that we see a lot of the events through the eyes of white people, and thus the whole issue looks sort of like another civil war in Africa. But overall, I think that the movie did a very good job showing how the diamond trade has financed some of the worst atrocities of the past ten years.
Also starring Arnold Vosloo (of "The Mummy") and Marius Weyers (of "The Gods Must Be Crazy").