Blood Diamond Review

The Film I am going to be a doing a review for is the movie Blood Diamond. The plot of this film takes Place in 1999 right in the middle of the Sierra Leon Civil war. The film is about two main characters Danny Archer (Leonard DiCaprio) and Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou). In this film Solomon Vandy is kidnapped by Sierra Leon Rebels and is forced to work in the Diamonds mines of Africa, and he eventually finds an extremely rare valuable blood diamond, which he hides in a camp( leaving the diamond behind), he then escapes from the mines to only find out his son has been kidnapped by the rebels, he then comes across Danny Archer who say he will help him find his son if he helps him find the Diamond, and the two then embark on a journey through Africa to retrieve the Diamond and his son.

                The director Edward Zwick shows several cultural themes throughout the film; however I would say his two main themes would be how human beings will do anything for power, and the blindness of people behind where diamonds come from. Let’s start with how brutal people can be when it comes to power. I say Zwick does an excellent job demonstrating this in the film. The director shows several scenes of just pure violence and destruction by the rebels of Sierra Leon, the rebels continuously return in the film and massacre innocent people, every time they come back you just think to yourself” great here we go again”, all these massacre scenes are extremely graphic and can be difficult to watch, they consist of children getting shot in the head and people getting their limbs cut off. All these scenes are put in the film to show how far the rebels willing to go in order to have all the power of Sierra Leon. Not only does Zwick does demonstrate this with graphic scenes he also uses Leonardo Dicaprio’s cunning and sneaky charm to show how far people are willing to go for power.  Leonardo continuously lies to every person in the film, to get closer to his goal of an extremely valuable blood diamond. Zwick also shows how young children are kidnapped and brainwashed and are turned into rebels to get the audience emotionally attached. Now for his next message, people’s blindness on Blood Diamonds in the world. A large reason why this film was made was to bring awareness to western societies of the gruesome hardships of where diamonds are actually coming from. I know personally I and every person that I have seen this film with had no idea of all the awful things that took place in order for Diamonds to be found and processed. Such as people being thrown into slavery, or people having limb cut off. The film also sheds light on how some of the biggest diamond companies in the world use conflict diamonds such as De beers. The film has a really good shock value.  The way Zwick show the blindness of individuals in the film is through a journalist (Jennifer Connelly) who wants to show the world the corruption behind these diamond, however she needs to find a names and statistics and her answer to her problem is Leonardo Dicaprio who originally in the film only cares about himself but, grows to feel for others and gives Connelly all the information she needs to spread the word on these conflict diamonds. Some people may say Edward Zwick was a bit too extreme on his message here but I personally disagree. I think Zwick needed to be extreme otherwise he could not get his message to the public. If Zwick was too soft in terms of showing what is going on in Africa, then his movie would have been pointless.  I overall loved the movie and thought Edward Zwick did a great job in this movie in every aspect.  I honestly cannot think of any flaws in the film that would stick out to cause any one not to watch this film. Blood Diamond is one of my all time favorite films and would give it five out of five stars. This film would be great to be seen now because of its relevance today with the “Kony” situation in Africa now. I would highly recommend this film to anyone because; it gives a great message and is relevant in today’s society. (740)

 Here is link to my Movie review http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0450259/reviews Its under Garbis09