A
21ST CENTURY RAMBO STOPS ETHNIC CLEANSING IN TEARS
OF THE SUN
Tears of the Sun,
directed by Antoine Fuqua, is about a rescue operation
in Nigeria. A news broadcast begins the film, reporting
that a civil war has broken out, with the Moslem North
engaging in ethnic cleansing of the Christian South,
following the assassination of the democratically-elected
president. Four American missionaries at a medical
facility are in jeopardy, so Captain Bill Rhodes (played
by Tom Skerritt) orders A. K. Waters (played by Bruce
Willis) to extract all four, an operation that requires
a squad of Navy Seals to be dropped near the medical
facility and subsequently picked up at a landing area.
When the Seals arrive to evacuate the missionaries,
Dr. Lena Kendricks (played by Monica Bellucci) refuses
to go unless the Nigerians hospitalized under her care
go along, and the other Americans insist on staying.
After a helicopter picks up Dr. Kendricks and the squad,
the sight of those who are being abandoned transforms
Waters. He orders the return of the helicopter, whereupon
Dr. Kendricks, Waters, and the crew disembark, reload
with the weakest patients, and Waters is prepared instead
to lead Dr. Kendricks and fifty or so Nigerians who
are not in the best of health on foot to sanctuary
in nearby Cameroon. Waters persuades Rhodes that he
is fulfilling the goal of the mission, but through
different means. The trek through the jungle is difficult.
At one point they observe ethnic cleansing in a village,
whereupon the Seals proceed to kill the Nigerian cleansers
to stop the carnage. That a mere rescue operation has
the firepower to fight a minor battle may seems odd,
but in time the squad takes on an entire regiment that
is closely tracking the fleeing group because a traitor
in the group is carrying a tracking device. Dr. Kendricks
foolishly had been withholding information from Waters
that one of the party seeking sanctuary is the son
of the deposed president; having killed the president
and all members of his family but the son, the Nigerian
rebels are intent on finishing the job at any cost.
There is no suspense about the ending, in which American
helicopters arrive to evacuate the president's son,
Dr. Kendricks, Waters, and what is left of the rescue
squad. Inexplicably, most of those who made the trek
remain in an unmanned refugee camp on the Cameroon
side of the border. Dr. Kendricks hugs wounded Waters
in the end as a brave soldier who has broken the rules
to do his humanitarian duty. But Willis's laconic Rambo
role clearly out-shouts the unspoken message that Washington
should pay more attention to ethnic cleansing in Africa.
Of course, helicopter missions could have evacuated
all patients from the hospital earlier in the film,
so one question is why Rhodes blocked that scenario.
Although Dr. Kendricks refers to the more recent civil war
in Sierra Leone, where events are closer to the Tears
of the Sun script, director Fuqua chose
Nigeria, presumably because his crystal ball says that
the 1967-1970 civil war in that country may reemerge
to challenge the government that was democratically
elected in 1999 and faces the voters again in April
elections, after nearly four years and 10,000 deaths
due to a variety of causes. The film ends with the
familiar Edmund Burke quote, "The only thing necessary
for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." Yet
the Frontline documentary The Triumph of
Evil (1999), about the Rwanda genocide,
makes that point far more convincingly. MH
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