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Berlian Berdarah Blood Diamond
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Blood Diamond
Director: Edward Zwick
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Connelly
Rated: R16
Screening: Now
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As African diamond smuggler Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio) says, "In America, it's bling-bling. But out here it's bling-bang."
And he's not kidding. Set in the late 1990s, this film certainly leaves no doubt as to where the blood in "blood diamond" comes from – and it's not because of its pretty pink hue. There are few punches pulled when it comes to showing war atrocities in this hard-hitting actioner with a message.
Blood Diamond opens with an innocent Sierra Leone fisherman, Solomon Vandy (a brilliant Djimon Hounsou), who has his world destroyed by the arrival of civil war in his village, in the form of sadistic, limb-chopping rebels from the RUF (Revolutionary United Front). Solomon manages to rescue his family but is himself enslaved and forced to work in a diamond mine.
There he makes the life-changing discovery of a priceless pink gemstone, possibly 100 carats, which brings him to the attention of the callous smuggler Danny, as well as an unpleasant RUF leader and, indirectly, a syndicate of foreign businessmen. Meanwhile, Solomon's beloved son, Dia, falls prey to the RUF and is trained as a child soldier.
From what we learn of Solomon's saviour, Danny, he's certainly no angel. Brutally orphaned in what was Rhodesia, raised in South Africa, a teenage soldier in Angola (handily explaining DiCaprio's wandering accent), and a former mercenary, Danny knows that "that diamond is my ticket out of this God-forsaken continent".
Danny meets and uses a crisis-junkie foreign correspondent, Maddy (Jennifer Connelly), to advance his desperate search for the diamond, and hands her a story on dirty diamond dealing along the way.
It can't be easy to distill an entire war and several current-affairs issues – predatory journalists, child soldiers, slave labour, international indifference, racism, war-mongering, man's inhumanity, etc. – into a fast-paced 143-minute action film. But Ed Zwick seems to have captured the essence, the fear and the dirt-cheapness of life in the conflict zones of Africa in the 1990s, while keeping the audience guessing over whether an immoral, self-centred mercenary will grow a heart.
Zwick has a nice eye for irony, too, with one beleaguered African villager commenting: "Let's hope they don't discover oil here or we'll have real problems".
A few too many shimmering sunsets and a cursory dash of romance may distract a little, but the story remains stirring, if a little exhausting. All that violence can become numbing. And as usual, our attractive leads manage to make it through several battle-zones with only a few decorative scratches on their million-dollar faces.
Along the way we're told that the United States, with its insatiable love of bling, is responsible for two-thirds of the world's diamond purchases, making it easy to see why this award-nominated film has rattled the cage of the diamond industry.
A mix of Hotel Rwanda and Lord of War, it is not easy to watch but it has some brilliant performances. Dipetik Dari stuff.co.nz By MARGARET AGNEW - The Press | Wednesday, 24 January 2007
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