The Sum Of All Fears

[ewx]

The big cliche that they avoided was this: instead of having the CIA agent hero find the exploding plot device and disarm by cutting the right wire just as the helpful countdown display got to the last second, it just blew up. The whole thing had very strong echoes of 9/11, and made me wonder if they'd started to make it before then: are Americans now better able to talk about coping with terrorism now that it's struck home so effectively?

Negative points: various staff totally failed to get critical information to the right people. The only person who visibly tried failed (because being the maverick hero, lots of senior people ignored him); but it shouldn't even have been his responsibility. Of course, the hero then has to run around trying to fix everything some other way; yet inexplicably he failed to use this critical information to convince anyone that he was on to something.

As I said elsewhere, I did enjoy the film; I think it's at the level I'd watch again on TV if it were on and I had one, but not that I'd seek it out to watch (e.g. by going to hire a video of it or something).

Comments

[simonb.livejournal.com]

The idea for the nuke going off was actually in the oringinal Tom Clancy novel which was published a number of years ago.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Thought as much. Not having read the novel I was expecting the usual Bond-style last minute save, right up until the moment the bomb went off - despite having seen the trailer with some of the fx from the explosion in. But the only bit you see in the trailer was the blast wave rushing across some basically empty ground, and that put me in mind of Broken Arrow; the bomb goes off in that too, but it's miles from anywhere and deep underground.

Actually Broken Arrow is a film I greatly enjoyed. Like TSOAF it, um, lacks intellectual pretension, but it's a good implementation of a thriller, and I really like the soundtrack l-)

[simonb.livejournal.com]

The book TSOAF was quite good, although I can see why they didn't follow the book that closely.

From just watching the trailers the main differences I can see so far are:

• The terrorists are Palestinian, not neo-nazis
• The plutonium for the bomb comes from an Israli nuke which was accidently left on a jet which was then shot down during the 6 day war in the 1970s
• Jake Ryan is deputy director of the intelligence arm of the CIA
• The scientist who builds the bomb (with the aid of one of the terrorists) is east german
• [May be in the film] the bomb was a "fizzle"; it was supposed to be a thermo-nuke, but due to contamination of the tritium used it didn't reach its full potential

And yes, Broken Arrow was indeed a good film :)

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Intelligence arm of the CIA? I thought the whole point of the CIA was that it was an intelligence organization?

[simonb.livejournal.com]

I have to admit that I'm not entirely sure what the different parts of the CIA are called. Basically its split into three main groups:

• Directorate of Intelligence - analytical stuff i.e. Jack Ryan is charge of this
• Directorate of Science & Technology
• Direct intervention - i.e. spies, human intelligence, etc

See this page (http://www.cia.gov/cia/information/info.html) for more details.