Saw the film Friday night. Up front, I will disclose that I am a big Clancy fan, but I’m not here to nitpick differences between the film and the book. I’m going to discuss the film more as “inspired by” than “based on” the book.
First–Affleck lies to his girlfriend about working for the CIA. Why? Since when do CIA office types have to do that? Ryan is not a covered field agent, he’s a low-level analyst. I figure he could say that he works for the CIA, but little to nothing about what he actually does.
Second–the bad guys. Yes, I know they were changed but they were lame. There was hardly any development of their motives or anything. It was just “they’re neo-Nazis, and since we all know Nazis are evil, there you go.”
Third–the nuclear explosion and its handling. I think that they shouldn’t have given away in the trailers that the bomb was going to go off. The IMDb the other day had a quote from the director saying that he wrestled with this same choice. I think it would have been a better surprise if they didn’t. The film is clearly being targeted at non-Clancy fans (since it plays so fast and loose with the book), and thus people who don’t know how the book ends. It would have been neat if people expected Ryan to clip wires and disarm the bomb to save the day.
Fourth–the bomb actually going off was a big disappointment. One was given no true sense of the destruction, since all we saw were a couple mushroom cloud shots and a shockwave traveling across what might as well have been the Mojave Desert.
And how did Affleck’s girlfriend (and everyone else at the hospital for that matter) seem pretty well unaffected by the explosion? The first thing we see of the bomb is all of them gettign blown away in the hospital and then they are fine later. Affleck looked pretty good for being in a helicopter crash, too.
By far, the best nuclear explosion I’ve ever seen in a movie is in Terminator 2.
Fifth–the setup of the football game. I know they can’t say NFL or Super Bowl for legal reasons, but they could have done a better job of setting up the importance of it all. They could have said “football championship” or something. And did we really need the shot of Morgan Freeman glancing at the scoreboard to remember what city he was in?
BTW, I’m guessing that the stadium was digitally inserted into the Baltimore skyline. The stadium in the game is really Olympic Park in Montreal. Also, right before the bomb goes off, on the far left you can see the Ravens Stadium in the aerial shot.
Finally, I’ll check in with the one thing I did like about the movie–Leiv Schreiber as John Clark. While he was (as Affleck was) way too young to play who he did and seemed underskilled compared to his literary counterpart, he was cool and funny at times even. I loved when Ryan was showing him the PDA and trying to be serious and the unflappable Clark just replies “I gotta get one of those. I don’t even have email.”
