The Sum of All Fears - movie - some spoilers

Tom Clancy’s first words in the DVD commentary of The Sum of All Fears, after director Phil Alden Robinson introduces him, are “I wrote the book they ignored.” Yeah, pretty much. It’s pretty obvious this film was made without Clancy involved, and as he picks apart many of the technical details in the film as it progresses, he’s clearly at least a little peeved about it.

I’m not a big Clancy fan, though, so that’s fine with me. I did like the two previous Clancy films, though, particularly Patriot Games, and it took a bit of a shift to understand that the Jack Ryan of the first three Clancy movies is really not the same Jack Ryan of the new one. Same name, but different guy. OK… took a bit, but I got it.

Once I got it, I had to admire the effort they went through to completely overhaul the story and the character, and really, it’s a pretty good film. I don’t think it’s the book Clancy wrote, or really, the story he intended to tell, but it’s a good story, and well-made.

Most impressive to me was how rarely the film depended on chiched techniques to carry the story along. The big scene in the middle,

in which the nuclear bomb is exploded at a Baltimore sports stadium,

was really surprisingly tasteful, and takes place at a moment when I didn’t expect it. I was genuinely shocking to both my wife and I (my wife let out a little shriek when it happened). The following scenes are effectively stark, and mark a real turning point in the film, visually and thematically.

The scene that follows shortly afterwards,

in which Russian jets attack and disable an American carrier,

is damn near a masterpiece. The mistake I feel most directors make is to draw those scenes out, making them too long (probably a result of wanting to use every last effects shot that the producers paid for). This scene is fast, so fast that its over almost before it really starts. It starts quickly and ends more quickly. It struck me as being very real.

Everything that follows is moderately predictable, though I liked certain angles. I liked the fact that the Arabs only play a minor role in the terrorist act, that the responsibility for it lies with a neo-Nazi organization (though Clancy also pointed out a valid flaw with that idea). I liked the way that the Russian and American presidents’ action were shown in parallel, and how very similar the processes they go through likely are. I loved the use of opera as the music in the beginning and end of the film; an excellent bookending mechanism.

And I really enjoyed seeing the always-talented Philip Alden Robinson at work again. One of my favorite films of all time is Sneakers. Sum of All Fears is a more serious movie than that one, and it’s certainly more challenging than Field of Dreams (which I also like). But it was good to see him apply his talents of character development and plotting to what might have been a fairly standard action-thriller. He added some dimension, and some nice surprises to it.

As for acting… though I liked him in Changing Lanes and other movies, it was hard to buy Ben Affleck as Jack Ryan, even a younger one. I didn’t feel that he really pulled it off for me. On the other hand, it was great to see Liev Schreiber in a pretty good role, and always nice to see Morgan Freeman play anything, even if it is a character that we’ve already seen die once. Seriously, pretty much everyone worked well except for Affleck.

I lost count of the times Clancy said “That part was crap, y’know,” during the commentary, and really I have little reason to doubt that much of it is. However, it was an effective film; timely and well-made. For a thriller (generally light fare for me), I enjoyed it. I think I still like Sneakers more in general, but really, they’re different sorts of films, and have little basis for a real comparison. Sum of All Fears was good in its own right, even it is a departure for its director and really only thinly related to the novel it is based on.

Other thoughts?

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I just watched this movie yesterday (not on DVD, so I can’t debate or discuss anything that Clancy said. I also have never fully read the book, so I can’t go there), but when did Morgan Freeman’s character (Cabot) die previously? The only person I can think of who died previously and was in the same sort of position as James Earl Jones’ character, but that was Admiral Greer.

I have read many of Clancy’s books and I read The Sum of All Fears many years ago when it first came out, and I enjoyed it very much.

I thought the movie was just…ok. Kind of bland, actually, but ok.

I like Liev Schreiber and I think he was ok in this move, but he is not John Clark. I understand that they wanted to update all the characters and use young actors and all. I bought Ben Affleck as a young version of Jack Ryan. But the John Clark character is an even bigger player in many of Clancy’s later novels and the way his background is described…

Well, Liev Schreiber just doesn’t fit.

Your first spoiler is not a spoiler. It should have been, but they gave that away in the trailer.

Does Clancy tell the story about him switching the city from Denver to Baltimore because his ex-wife lives in Baltimore?

Frankly, I thought it sucked. There, someone had to say it.

I just saw this movie yesterday for the first time and I liked it. I thought it was pretty good.

I heard that the book is FAR different than the movie. The only thing I know is that the terrorists are Arab in the book and the bomb goes off in Denver.

How did the books story differ from the movie besides those 2 basic points? Most of the flick took place in russia. Does any of the book even deal with Russia at all?

Can anyone give a quick synopsis of the book for me? I don’t really have time to read it right now.

Thank you.

BTW, I agree with this whole heartedly. WTF were they thinking giving away what could have been the biggest suprise of the movie in the damn commercials? They may as well have shown Neo waking up in the Matrix in the Matrix commercials.

I recognized this scene, besides also being in the trailer and commercials, as lifted almost directly out of Clancy’s second book, Red Storm Rising. In that book, Islamic terrorists destroy part of the USSR’s oil production, which spurs on a NATO-Warsaw Pact war. It’s not terribly relevant now, as probably one of the last books to rise out of Cold War-era fears.

Yeah, after that Denzel Washington movie in New York, can’t make any more movies about Arab terrorists. But Nazis, man, everyone hates them. :rolleyes:

I enjoyed the movie, and I thought it was the best performance I’ve seen from Ben Affleck. Morgan Freeman was excelent as always.

A scene I loved that hasn’t been mentioned yet: Jack’s call to cancel his date while on the plane to Russia.

The only part I liked was when John Clark was totally blowing off Ryan’s mission briefing by admiring the PDA–“I’ve gotta get me one of those. I don’t even have email.”

The movie sounded like one I’d be interested in, but I just couldn’t stomach the PC revisionism enough to watch it. “Ohh, it would be racist to have the sort of people who crash planes into buildings set off a nuke, lets make it a bunch of white guys” was just too annoying of a change from the book for me.

Wait, I thought that Clancy greenlighted the changes to Ryan’s character. That was the whole reason that Clancy wrote “Red Rabbit”, wasn’t it? To do some backstory with a young Jack Ryan?

And yeah, Clark just wasn’t the right Clark. However, I think the actor’s appearance is a little more on target than William DaFoe’s John Clark. DaFoe is just too identifiable - this new guy looks like he could disappear into just about any crowd of people.

I sympathize with having a hard time with changes from a book you like (I felt the same way about Mists of Avalon), but since the script of the film was written and most of the film shot before 9/11, attributing the changes to that thinking is simply disingenuous. The movie obviously made many changes from the book; the change in villain is no worse than the change in lead character.

Robinson, in the commentary, attributes the change in the villain mainly to the idea that a movie can’t really convey the complexity of a typical Clancy plotline. The book involved a conspiracy between several groups and cultures (including a Native American, I believe), but Robinson didn’t feel that story could be told in a 2-hour film. So he simplified the plot quite a bit, and since Clancy made it clear in the world of his book that the Arab terrorists couldn’t get the bomb into the US without help, he invented the neo-Nazi organization. Clancy had valid criticisms of that, too, but the switch was not made out of a PC sensibility. It was made in the interest of paring down the story.

I really liked Schreiber’s portrayal of John Clark. It wasn’t the character from the book, true, but it was a nicely-done reluctant warrior sort of character, done with charm and depth. Dafoe’s take on it was a little too obvious, though I normally like Dafoe as an actor.

If you take the ‘crashing planes into buildings’ literally you could, so just replace it with ‘hijacking planes, suicide bombing, and all of the other pre-911 terrorist stuff’ - it was simply a shorthand way of summing up why making the book villains fit the description of people who actually commit terrorist acts was sensible. It’s not like PC started in 2001.

But they pulled the trigger without help, didn’t they? Why not just have the bombers bring the bomb in themselves and ignore the help, since neo-Nazis couldn’t bring in a nuke by themselves either? The skin color issue looms large…

So you’re saying it’s just a coincidence and not PC nonsenese that the guys who set off a nuke went from being non-white to white (and non-christian to fundamentalist christian)? Sorry, I just don’t buy it - I think it’s pretty clear what happened.

Commentary by an author who didn’t like the movie? Pretty good idea - I would like to hear Steven King complain about The Shining in a commentary.

Of course, the best implementation of this idea was the commentary of This is Spinal Tap by Spinal Tap.

Clear to you, maybe. However, I tend to trust what the filmmakers have to say about it a little more. Their reasoning made sense to me, and I see no need to put a ‘PC Nonsense’ spin on it. I’ll be the first to call a movie on playing to PC sensibilities, as I did when Zoolander airbrushed the Twin Towers out of their New York footage. That was PC nonsense. I don’t get the same feeling from Sum of All Fears, and the filmmakers’ statements would seem to back up my feeling about it.

Besides, are Arabs the only people capable of committing terrorism? The skin color issue only looms large if you let it… what really matters in the movie is terrorism itself, not skin color. That’s a peripheral issue at best.

Their “reasoning” didn’t exist; “Well, the non-white guys in the book got help from other groups, so we replaced them entirely with white guys who also wouldn’t really be able to get the bomb in without help” makes a mockery of the whole concept of reason.

And I’m not really suprised that someone asserting that ‘replace the fundie-muslims with neo-nazis’ was in no way a PC act would accuse me of racism for pointing it out. Can you PC-apologists at least stop accusing anyone who points out PC-nonsense of racism?

And I must have missed that whole series of hijackings by neo-nazis, or their '93 bombing of the WTC which makes them a sensible casting choice for detonating a nuke in the US. If skin color is so unimportant, why did they feel the need to change it to white in the movie at the expense of realism?

I just saw this movie last week. I can’t remember any instance or evidence that they were fundamental Christian. Care to elaborate?

Please point out where I accused you, in any way, of racism. I pointed out that the issue of race is peripheral to the film in question, and asked you a genuine question. I never accused you of racism. In fact, I didn’t say anything about you at all. Your objection is invalid… and I’m far from a “PC-apologist.”

Let’s keep the discussion to the movie, shall we? I don’t appreciate the ad hominem comments.

Getting back to the movie…

I thought the book was absolutely fantastic, my second favorite Clancy (after Hunt for Red October). I thought the movie was good, with some of the same appeal, but it lacked a few of my favorite parts from the book:

In the book, when the medium level bad guys are captured near the end of the book, Clark goes to work on them to extract who they were working for. They eventually pretend to crack and tell Clark the name of a middle eastern country. Thing is, it’s the wrong country (I think the implication was that it was Iran), and they’re hoping that the US will attack it, causing retalation, war, disaster, etc. Of course, this occurs very shortly after a nuclear detonation wipes out much of Denver, so the president wants to strike back. He orders a nuclear strike, they go through the identification card and number rigmarole, and the only other senior official present, which happens to be Jack Ryan, refuses to confirm his own identity, preventing the strike.

In the book, when the nuclear-investigation squad is on scene at the blast site, they do a quick visual assessment of the damage and decide that it was a bomb of around 15 kilotons. They call up headquarters to pass on this information, but due to a bad phone connection, headquarters thinks they said 50 kilotons, which leads them to believe it must have been the Soviets, not a rogue terrorist bomb. This always struck me as very plausible in the kind of emergency situation that would be going on…

Also, I agree with 99.7% certainty that the motivation for changing the bad guys from arabs to nazis was motivated by PC.