Should have won the Oscar for Best Picture

Rating: 10/10 (29 March 2007)

Solomon (Hounsou)a fisherman turned diamond miner for the rebels in Sierra Leone finds and hides a Blood Diamond (also known as Pink). Danny Archer (DiCaprio), a diamond smuggler knows Solomon hid the diamond. The two must work together to achieve their very different goals.
I thought I had seen enough movies where violence and sheer killing madness ruled, but I was not prepared for this one. It is the most violent I have ever seen, but consider this: the choreography of such killings was outstanding. That is a terrible thing to say, but when you see what is going on, everything flowed like poetry. You couldn't help but notice that. That director gave us a sense of something we should never see, or hear about. It was like I was there and I kept hoping it would all stop and never start again. You keep asking yourself how could human beings act this way and I am talking about the rebels in Sierra Leone in the late 1990s. These things really did happen and most of the world knew nothing about them. Now, get this: the rebels recruited young boys to do much of the killing too. Solomon's son was one of them. The story is fiction, but the events in Sierra Leone, at that time, were very real.
I know The Departed won the Oscar for Best Picture, but I would have given it to this movie. All in all, the production, and the acting was a cut above everything else. DiCaprio is in a league of his own and he makes all the others in the cast better. There is no other way to say it even at his young age. Yes, he came up with a Rhodesian South African accent and that was fine. Marlon Brando did much the same thing with accents dependent on what was needed for the story. DiCaprio also did a New Jersey accent in The Departed. It worked.
The movie is long but never drags. When it looks like it may slow down, here comes a gang of rebels or soldier children in jeeps killing everything in sight. At the end of the movie a notice says that today Sierra Leone is quiet, but that there are still 200,000 soldier children. That's still scary.
The movie itself and the director Edward Zwick should have been nominated and they weren't. DiCaprio was nominated for Best Actor and that's something, but not good enough. Do the nominations have to be limited to five?
Violence: Yes,Sex: No, Nudity: No, Language: Yes