Good, but could have been so much better.

Rating: 7/10 (24 April 2007)

Let me count the ways:
1. Better casting.
Malkovich and Ngor are terrific, but surely they could have found a more compelling (not necessarily better, just more compelling) actor than Waterson to play the lead.
2. Better score.
What the %$&# was that? You know, I think "Tubular Bells" works well in *The Exorcist*, but they never should have let this guy score a whole movie. It's ugly and overwrought, and I swear to God that in places, it's over-explanatory character almost crosses the line into "Mickey Mousing."
3. Better closing song.
"Imagine"? "I"-freaking-"MAGINE"?! The killing fields of Cambodia represent Lennon's idiotic totalitarian fantasies taken to their logical conclusion. This is what happens when you try to reshape human nature to fit an ideological mold. You can't do it, so you just end up killing everyone. The use of this song demonstrates that the filmmakers had no idea what the hell they were making a film about.
4. More honesty.
It might have behooved the filmmakers, when they were giving Sidney Schanberg (in the person of Waterston) free rein to spew his puerile blame-America-first leftism, to have acknowledged that Schanberg wrote pro-Khmer Rouge propaganda intended to convince the American people that a Communist takeover of Cambodia would be a very fine thing indeed (including, mere days before the Communist victory, a piece headline "Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life").
5. Less racism.
OK, Dith Pran wants to stay in Cambodia because he's a reporter and it's his job. But it's Schanberg's fault that Pran stays because...well, apparently because Pran's just an Asian who shouldn't be allowed to make his own decisions. I can't see any other reason why it's Schanberg's responsibility. Pran is a grown man.
And I touched above on the film's blaming America for the Khmer Rouge atrocities. Apparently Asians can't be expected to know how to behave. If they kill millions of people, it can only be because of something Great White Father did.
But for all that, I still recommend the film as a depiction of what Communism is in its essence--even if the filmmakers don't quite seem to have grasped it themselves.