| Cut above the genre |
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| written by Texan99 |
September 4, 2010 - 12:54 PM PDT |
| A movie about whom you can save and whom you can bear to leave behind when you have the opportunity to escape yourself. Setting aside my annoyance at the many characters who refuse to arm themselves and instead expect others to come protect them at great risk to themselves, I found the film a powerful treatment of each Europeans character's choice (the Africans are presented as having none). The first choices are those of the priests, nuns, and doctor (Belucci), who must decide whether to leave the wounded behind in the initial evacuation. Willis, the Navy seal who's been sent to evacuate only the Europeans, doesn't at first experience any sense of choice. He's a hardened veteran of many successful missions conducted under orders by the book: his job is to save the Europeans, period. Early on, however, he unexpectedly does find that he has a choice, brought on not by Belucci's begging him to help the Africans (a request that leaves him totally unmoved), but by the way she turns her face away in absolute resignation and is undone by grief. This would have been a finer movie if the circumstances that drove each character to his excruciating choice made more sense instead of being a series of terse but inexplicable messages that this LZ is available that that one isn't, or only X helicopters can be sent when you need Y. Even so, I was drawn in by the way Willis and his men found themselves no longer able to see the refugees as objects. Once they become people, all bets were off. |
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