Lord of War

In a world in which Hollywood's cash cow is worse sequels to bad movies, the rare occasion of a movie that appears to involve some thought is a rare joy. One such movie is Lord of War (2005), an insightful commentary on arms sales disguised as a drama. As a movie, it was less than amazing, but as food for thought, it was more than filling. In fact, the film is sufficiently true to real events (not least its indictment of the US Government as the largest arms dealer in the world) that they were unable to secure funding in the US and had to look overseas. Despite general critical acclaim, it was not nominated for any awards.

Lord of War is about a Ukrainian immigrant (psuedonym "Yuri Orlov", played by Nicolas Cage) whose family disguised themselves as Jews and fled to America, opening a restaurant. In order to get out of the family business, Yuri becomes a small-time gun-runner, selling UZIs (and such) to thugs. His aspirations lead him (eventually) to become a big-timer, perhaps the big-timer. Chaos ensues. If you want a plot synopsis, there are plenty of places to get that. Instead, I'm going to talk about what I liked. The primary factor in my enjoyment was, to be honest, the political message. In fact, you are provided with a fairly brilliant piece of commentary before the movie even begins, in the credits, where you see the life of a bullet from the cradle to the grave (almost literally.)

The Official Site for the movie attempts to send you to www.yuriorlov.com as a reference on "THE REAL YURI ORLOV", but the site appears to be down and besides, it's a fictional character. In fact, there is a human rights activist by the same name. The important point is that the film provides a reasonably accurate portrayal of arms sales, the mechanisms behind them, and so on. Amnesty International lent their support to the film as a source of enlightenment, so as you might imagine it is a bit wroth and heavy-handed about the entire situation. They definitely do spend some time beating you over the head with the message. But on the other hand, perhaps this is a message we need to be beaten with - especially here in the USA, where we are today the primary contributors to the problem. They make the assertion that the top five arms dealers are all nations, and not coincidentally make up the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. While this assertion has been debated, it's not clear how much falsehood could be found in it. Perhaps one of the five has slipped down to the six-spot? Regardless, they are all "leaders" in the field.

As usual, Wikipedia has a wealth of trivia (as does The IMDB) which you may or may not find interesting - but one item I was quite taken with is that it was actually cheaper to rent 3,000 AK-47s and a number of assorted military vehicles (including tanks) from real-life arms dealers than it would have been to simulate them using computer graphics (CG). This is fascinating stuff! You would think that by now rendering out some guns and tanks would be a triviality, given that we seem to be closing in on the last hurdles in simulating humans (like subsurface light scattering in skin) but perhaps acquiring arms is even more trivial.

The basic relevance of the film is described simply and accurately by co-star Ethan Hawke, who plays Orlov's INTERPOL counterpart, who says "the truth of the matter is that this country makes a lot of weapons and we sell a lot of weapons. And we sell them to a lot of poor people who kill each other with them." Yeah, that's pretty much the size of it.