I saw this once about a month ago, when it was still a “work in progress,” but after seeing it again last night, I’ll be durned if I can spot the changes they made, other than some filling out of the music throughout the movie.
Anyway, compared to the book, it’s a fairly loose similarity:
The terrorists are neo-nazis instead of Arabs/Mid-Easterners
The bomb blows up half way through the movie…in Baltimore.
Bill Cabot dies.
Affleck plays a younger Jack Ryan, still just an analyst, not yet even engaged to Kathy.
President Fowler is the same guy.
More stuff I don’t recall, because it’s been a long time since I read the book.
While I really don’t care for Ben “the duck” Affack playing Ryan, one thing I did really like was Liev Schreiber playing John Clark. He pulled off the calm, cool demeanor quite well as well as being a stone-cold killer when he had to be.
The movie had, well, not much in the way of character development. The plot was fairly straightforward with pretty much no surprises to speak of. I suppose, overall, it was entertaining, but it really fails to live up to the books, falling short of the marks of Clear and Present Danger, Patriot Games and even* The Hunt For Red October.*
One thing that was just dumb, but they did for the cutesy effect was at the end: [spoiler]Spinnaker (the Russian guy that sometimes feed info to our side) reveals himself to Jack and Cathy…in plain sight and open air. He also makes very obvious reference to having either bugged or strongly spied upon Jack when he gives them an engagement gift (Jack stammers and says “How did you know that? We haven’t told anyone!”
I still can’t get over the fact that the filmmakers changed the villains from Arabs to Eastern European fascists. I haven’t been this outraged since Hollywood changed the killer in “Rising Sun” from a Japanese executive to a white American!
Look, I didn’t like “Rising Sun” as a novel. I thought Crichton was paranoid, alarmist, and bordering on flat-out racism. Still, it WAS a best-seller, so a movie version was inevitable. But, come on, Japan basing was the WHOLE POINT of the story. If you don’t like that story, why make the movie at all?
In the same way, “Sum of All Fears” was built around angry Arabs and hard-line communists teaming up to destroy America. If you don’t like that plot, fine- then DON’T MAKE THE MOVIE!
Changing the ethnicity and the motives of the villains, in both cases, was cowardly and unforgivable.
I think it would have been better if the trailers didn’t give away the fact that the bomb does in fact go off.
Let’s face it–this movie is a slap in the face to Clancy fans who have read the book and know what happens. It would have been an amazing twist to those who have never read the book to go in and expect Ben Affleck to disarm a nuke at the Super Bowl and make the world save for Truth, Justice, and The American Way but instead get KABOOM.
Also, the trailer/movie also apparently messes with the very nature of the bomb. In the movie, it would seem that it is a tremendous explosion that levels quite a bit of the city. In the book, the bomb doesn’t even blow up the entire stadium. This is why Ryan knows it can’t be the Russians–the bomb wasn’t up to the standards of a nation-state launching a missile.
I haven’t read the book but I agree with a lot of what has been said in this thread and the other about this movie.
I enjoyed the movie as a pure “watch the exciting story unfold” experience. The end came before I realized it - “wow, was that 2 hours already?!” However, it just didn’t seem to flow right. The whole nuclear detonation thing seemed done very clumsily, out of the blue but not in a “wow…what a twist” sort of way, more of a “wait…hold on, that doesn’t fit right in the plot” way. My friend and I were wondering if this film was hastily re-edited after 9/11 ?
Although I can see how you liked John Clarks’ potrayal, did his age concern you at all? Remember JC is an old fart-still a badass, but not some fresh faced kid with a score to settle on some drug dealers…I said too much didn’t I?
