What should be moving is steeped in cheese.

Rating: 4/10 (27 November 2008)

What was taken away after a viewing of The Killing Fields is not any sort of empathy with those poor Cambodians or the plight of Dith Pran, but a genuine hatred of Roland Joffe for believing his audience is made up of moronic dolts so ignorant and unsophisticated that they need to be told that the insanity and murder on display is a very bad thing. Really, thank god for the 30 inserts of crying children while overpowering sadness-score swells exponentially. Feel bad! You must FEEL BAD FOR THEM! Joffe's narcissism viciously attacks us at every turn with how goddamn important he knows this film is. It's brutal and insulting.
This is a shame, as there are some skillfully choreographed sequences where our protagonists are shuffled from place to place in total confusion as to the situation. These contain little to no dialogue and articulate a great deal through imagery. Of course there is the outrageously bizarre musical accompaniment that deflates any interest in the scenes. It's as if Joffe hired Trent Reznor and Danny Elfman and told them to meet somewhere in the middle. The much hyped performance of Haing S. Ngor is not Earth shattering but definitely impressive, especially as a non actor who totally out-acts the rest of the cast. The tragedy is that as a man who actually survived all the misery we see in this film, he deserved to be in a far better portrayal of the insanity the Khmer Rouge put Cambodia through. All we learn about the calamitous conflict is that "it sucked." Granted, the focus of this film is on the characters of the reporters, but the audience should know a bit about what they are seeing. The Khmer Rouge appears like a magical force that simply showed up and took over. This might be asking for too much of a different film, but it seems necessary for something that clearly wants to be the total embodiment of the Cambodian conflict. A film that bastardizes John Lennon's "Imagine" in such a horrific, tug-at-the-heart-strings fashion deserves no such moniker. It's an ending so overdone and steeped in cheese that all in the audience will cry, but not for the intended reason.