Triumph Of The Human Spirit

Rating: 10/10 (13 July 2002)

Without doubt THE KILLING FIELDS is one of the greatest films ever to have come out of Britain . The cinematography is outstanding , watch the numerous scenes where someone runs past the camera and the camera follows them only to have the camera follow someone else when they run past it , or the way the camera spins around when the journalists are captured outside the hospital , but this film is rightly remembered for one man : Haing S Ngor , a Cambodian doctor who had his own horrors to tell after nearly being captured by the Khmer Rouge ( !!!! POSSIBLE SPOILER !!!!!) the scene near the end where he sees the red cross refugee camp in Thailand is one of the most moving in the history of cinema .
I won`t bother to list all the great things about the film , but I will reply to some criticisms . First of all the anti American slant . Well I think we can all agree that America`s intervention in South East Asia in the 1960s has been the greatest mistake in American history . Their war in Vietnam and the bombing of Cambodia and Laos caused the massive instability that led to the rise of Pol Pot and as THE KILLING FIELDS shows when the Americans fought and lost they abandoned the Cambodian people to their fate. I also agree that the music can be intrusive but has anyone noticed that we get string orchestras for Dith Pran and ordinary Cambodian civilians and mechanical synthesisers for KR killers ? I think there`s a reason for this . My only other criticism is that after reading Christopher Hudson`s novelization the script makes makes some of the characters vague like Noakes and Rosa for example . But there`s not much wrong with THE KILLING FIELDS , a throwback to a time when Brits made films that weren`t comedies , though I`ll be the first to admit that this film won`t be to everyone`s taste .

And as I write this review many years after it was made THE KILLING FIELDS does have an added poignancy today . Dr Haing S Ngor was brutally murdered by a street gang for no reason at all several years ago . And we see Sydney Schanberg looking across the New York skyline with a very prominent shot of the twin towers of the WTC