The Killing Fields

Rating: Null/10 (26 September 2011)

The movie called "The Killing Fields," (1984) by Roland Joffé is about a journalist, Sydney Schanberg, from the New York Times who went to Cambodia during the catastrophic year when the civil war began, and millions of innocent people got killed. Sydney's translator Dith Pran, an actual Cambodian, ended up being a very close friend of his. As a journalist he was expected to cover the war incidents to protect the United States. When the situation in Cambodia got too unstable to even live there, Dith sent his family to America where he planned on coming later. After a series of events of trying to escape the country with his American friends, Dith got rejected and all the Americans left back to their homeland. The Khmer Rouge, a movement of rebels, moved into Cambodia and destroyed the country completely. Dith was taken as a slave and almost died like many other innocent people did too. He finally escaped with a few other people, of whom none survived the long hike they had to take, so he arrived to a refugee camp alone, where he got saved. There they recognized his face because his old time friend, award winner, Sydney Schanberg had sent a picture of him to many organizations around the world because he wanted to locate him. Sydney and Dith both move back to America where they lived happy.
According to the User Reviews on www.IMDb.com "movie is so beautiful and touching (and so very graphic) that one cannot help but be affected by it." It is rated as 8.0 out of a total score of 10. Rated by David Gruder on November 2004, he definitely rates this movie as one of the best ones he has seen. He clearly explains "I'm not a huge fan of action or fantasy or romance movies, I have so-called "comedies" but I love genuine FILM, as in FILM not MOVIE; art as opposed to enterprise." What he means by this statement is that this is not a movie to laugh at, or to enjoy, it's a true story based on extremely tragic events.
This movie, not as all other true story films, is sending a very strong message; especially to journalists. At Emerson College, one of the most important majors is journalism. It can be very hard to debate until what extent is a journalist willing to go to in order to release the truth about something. Emerson students should be informed of this because they were a series of events that marked history in a very strong way; something everyone should know about.