MAY 2022:
What Was Once Old Is Made New Again…
With the war raging in Ukraine put upon them by Russia, I have found myself re-watching movies where Russia was the plot point driving the story. I have always found when trying to understand an event occurring that causes me great stress, I watch a movie to relax. Most people do this as a solution to a stressful day. Put on a good movie and escape the day’s stress. But it is a little more than that when I am watching. When I watch a movie and its storyline starts to seem similar to a real situation, I become more engaged in the film and invest in how it’s going to turn out. That will often happen when I am viewing a film for the first time. When I watch a film like The Sum of All Fears that has been out for a quite a long time but I feel it is relevant to now more than when it was made, it becomes a new film all over again. I watched it in 2022 with a different set of eyes than I did when I saw it in the theater in 2002. Global relations with Russia has never really been all that great to begin with. This has made it easy to write Russia as the villain in so many Hollywood Espionage Thrillers. Russia has made it very easy to depict them as a threatening nuclear superpower.
With Fresh Eyes…
When the war started in Ukraine and the West was soon having vague threats come from Vladimir Putin that were nuclear in nature without ever directly threatening it, I thought of this movie. I felt there was a similarity in this particular Jack Ryan story that was unfortunately relevant and relatable to what is currently going on with global geopolitics. Yes, it is a movie and what happens in The Sum of All Fears isn’t real, but the nature of what the film is about in relation to Russia is very real. It shouldn’t be, if you ask me, but it is. We should be doing better as a society to sustain all lives, not threaten their end. All these centuries living as a society of people and were still looking for ways to put violence upon each other to end each other’s lives. The motivating factor is quite often an ideal that one part of society doesn’t adhere to or agree with. But all these generations of progress, diplomacy and Democracies and we still haven’t figured out how to live amongst each other despite our differences. It just becomes so disheartening and tragic to see what we are willing to do to each other in the name of a differing opinion. We should be healthly debating our differences and finding the compromises in the chaos. With a compromise, no one wins but the problem we have as a society of people is someone has to win. I re-watched the film thinking how so little has changed since the movie was made in 2002, while so much has indeed stayed the same making the film as relevant today as that Memorial Day Weekend in 2002 when the film came out.
I Only One Aspect Was Real..
I do wish however, we were dealing with Ciarán Hinds Russian President Nemerov and not our reality Vladimir Putin. They are complete opposites diplomatically and the fake Russian President had mercy even at the hight of miscommunication on the brink of war. If we had a Nemerov type to deal with as the Russian President, I imagine the political climate in Russia would look drastically different all these decades. Re-Watch the movie and see what I’m talking about!
You can watch President Nemerov’s Introductory Scene in The Sum of All Fears here: