Director Joffé makes a Killing on his first feature film, as the bond between two men form during a situation of extremities is explored.

Rating: 7/10 (2 November 2010)

The Killing Fields opens with a voice-over telling us of a few brief, matter of fact items regarding the Asian locality of Camboida; a coming of speech which informs us of how The West see it as a lonely, isolated, untouched paradise over long shots of warm, tropical iconography in the form of low sunsets and palm trees. Where the compositions are rather picturesque and the supposed views glowing, The Killing Fields is a film more about the death and destruction going on within a corrupt and putrid nation; those of whom run it share similar characteristics. The suggestion that something is very wrong with the established Western view is hinted at when a large aircraft used for bombing raids ominously flies overhead, before we cut to a closer shot physically bringing us a little deeper into the locale thus revealing a young boy wearing a war helmet. In a basic sense, Utopian iconography of an "untouched paradise" has been replaced by standard war genre codes; an un-Earthing of the truth after a prior stance has been just been deconstructed, the film itself a documenting of the atrocities that occurred within the nation of Cambodia between 1973 and 1975, and whose opening from the lead wonderfully ties in with his own experiences as we observe him at various points in the film try to uncover the truth about an event, within an event.
Roland Joffé's quite wondrous film covers the true story of a man, an American journalist, named Sydney Schanberg here played by Sam Waterston and his friendship with several other men of western origin as well as native Cambodian photojournalist Dith Pran, played by the Oscar winning and now tragically deceased Haing S. Ngor. Joffé's film is a systematic deconstructing of this supposed myth the opening voice over speaks of and a somewhat effortless encompassing of post-war mental states linked to that of predominantly guilt as well as life as a prisoner of a new order on top of that. The film is a taut, mediative piece on one's actions and the decisions one makes in the heated coven of wartime whilst battling on the front-line, not as soldier with a gun but as a journalist with a camera, and how these shape the immediate situation as well as how these decisions made come to affect those involved years later; the centrepiece of which is a harrowing race against time when several characters are holed up in a building located in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, as a man's life seems hours away from being ended due to incoming dangers.
How it came to that is a tale altogether; the resulting misadventures born out of it additionally something else with the story of two men coming to understand one another under intensified circumstances the film's first port of call. When we begin with one of these men, we begin with Pran being chauffeured around town in a Mercedes, something which suggests importance; the presence of the car radio set to an American station playing out in English also suggesting bilinguality thus an education and the dialogue-free interactions he engages in with two passing monks as he walks past them on a public street hinting at not only respectful characteristics but perhaps a decent, positive reputation that he himself carries resulting in people stopping and bowing their heads to him. The characteristics are that of a binary opposition when placed up alongside those in the Cambodian Communist organisation known as The Khmer Rouge, the chief instigators of hate and fear throughout the film and the chaos and terror they instill into both the film and those involved later on because of the finale of the Vietnam War spilling out into the neighbouring nation.
The film scatters the nationalities of most of the other first world, usually Capitalist, officials Schanberg and Pran deal with; a deliberate deploying of varying nationalities representative of The First World attempting some form of aid to those of Pran's ilk involved in the hardships, everything from Australia to Scotland to England to Russia. But the film is less bothered with the politics than it is of the true story of these two men linking up; Schanberg's relationship with Pran, like Pran's characteristics in regards to his own natives The Khmer Rouge, is in stark opposition to that of his getting along with The American Government, whom he berates from the beginning and clashes with on a number of personal and political points. After initially arriving and meeting with a relatively spaced out photojournalist named Al Rockoff (Malkovich), Schanberg is forced into travelling to the site of an American bombing raid with some locals when denied access to fly out along with the Americans; a later event as Schanberg attempts to practise liberalism in trying to photograph some atrocities leading to arrest and later realisation at press fabrication with what they perceived to have happened there that day.
Pran's staying in Cambodia following evacuation orders on behalf of Schanberg leads him to a nightmarish post-war space of authority, totalitarianism and a strong military presence operating under a banner of a 'Year One' mentality. The distinction as to what sorts of environments each of the respective parties, Pran still in the Far East and Schanberg in New York City, inhabit in this: their post-Cambodia living, is pointed out via the kinds of mediums and sources of cultural indulgence they have access to or the ability to be exposed to. Where Schanberg is free to engage with the news; home video and opera, Pran is having to surrender to a dictatorship wanting to eradicate free thinking and bring everybody down to the same level. The finale and what transpires in leading up to it is fraught with angst and terror infused within both parties; a nerve-shredding trek in both a psychological and physical sense of either man desperate to be reunited. For this a many other things, the film is a triumph.