A Great Film, But With Some Flaws

Rating: 8/10 (23 March 2009)

The acting is very good. I'm not just saying that because I'm impressed brown people from foreign countries can act (as I suspect many are). Some of the guards are impressively menacing, for example. It's hard to give John Malkovitch credit because he's always good.
The story is a little self-indulgent; much of it is about the Americans. I'd venture to guess that the actual Killing Field period takes up less than 40% of the film's time.
The score is lousy, but then, really, a lot of scores at the time this was made were terrible. (Yes, there are some gems. But there's a whole lot of rubble.)
Ultimately, my problem with the movie is that if you're looking for a fair understanding of what happened in Cambodia, this isn't it. It's an attempt by some people to wash their hands of their own culpability, and to whitewash the atrocities committed by those whose political philosophy they are sympathetic towards.
The show does nothing of any real significance to demonstrate the unparalleled horror that the Khmer inflicted on Cambodia, and instead hopes to write it off as the result of American bombing. Silly.
Leave aside the unmentioned fact that the bombings were sanctioned by the Cambodian government, which had thrown out the Prince who was allowing the country to be used by the North Vietnamese. That's not an unimportant fact. (I hope viewers understand that Cambodia is how the North Vietnamese infiltrated the South - get a map and look at where Saigon and the Mekong Delta are, and you'll suddenly begin to understand why there was so much fighting in that notorious swamp and why Nixon bombed Cambodia. Secret? To whom? It was no secret to the Cambodians. The fact that some Americans drone on about its secrecy is merely evidence of their own self-importance. What does the secrecy of the bombings - to the American mind - have to do with the fact that leftist Cambodians were teaching children to hack their families to death with machetes? If "the bombings" made them do it, why the need to indoctrinate children away from the idea of family? One has zero to do with the other, but everything to do with a philosophy of Party and State.)
But you're talking about a regime (the Khmer) that managed - in a country with a population density somewhere around present-day Wisconsin - to round up and slaughter somewhere between 1 out of every 6 and 1 out of every 4 people. Even the Vietnamese didn't commit these kinds of atrocities and we flattened the place. They had cities to bomb and bomb them we did. As we did Germany and Japan. The Khmer always intended to do the things they did, but it would be too much for Chomskyites to admit that this is the logical conclusion of their radical inclinations.
It would be good to really get a handle on what was done. I suspect we'll have to wait a long time before we ever get a fair treatment of what happened to the Kulaks, what happened in the real Gulags, during the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the North Vietnamese conquering of the South and what the Khmer did.
The use of Communist Viet Nam appears only as the plot device (albeit a historic one) that allows the protagonist to attempt his escape (of course, by a "real" Khmer patriot, now suddenly worried about where his country is going). It mentions the border scuffles in a single line. Nothing about the fact that waves of human beings were fleeing Cambodia by any means possible to Thailand, Burma and Viet Nam (which was already conducting its own pogrom against the South while gearing up to go to war with their former sponsors the Chinese). Red on Red indeed.
And yeah: "Imagine" is a silly song. Communists butchered many, many people because those people were attached to their religions. This is just spitting on their graves.