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]

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.