The Sum of All Fears (2002)

Actors excellent! Script not so good.
I enjoyed the first hour or so of this film, but then it turned into a replay of War Games. The last 30-40 minutes jumped around and were so rushed that all that remained was the predictable outcome.

Propaganda is hateful, epecially when it smells antisemitic
This film could have been a good one. It came out after 9/11 but before Iraq, at the time of Afghanistan. It is about the "final" confrontation between the USA and Russia. A nuclear terrorist attack is organized in Baltimore so that the USA may believe it comes from the Russians and may start the procedure leading to a full out nuclear war. From the very start the theory that is illustrated here is that terror in the world is organized by the Israeli secret services with the help of some western autonomous adventurers and with the complicity of the hard liners in the Russian and Ukrainian armies. Then the whole story is difficult to believe because of the total lack of real believable hard facts. The American president appears as quite manipulated by his own military personnel and his State and Defense Secretaries, without speaking of the CIA. The Russian president appears just as much manipulated but with maybe a little bit more nerve. The whole plot fails because a small CIA intellectual agent manages to speak to the Russian president directly via the red telephone and make him take the decision to halt his alert, a decision that the US president immediately imitates. How can we believe that. The Weapons of Mass Destruction are quoted in some remote small sentence somewhere unimportant but the propaganda is clear. The various actors of this plot are then eliminated one after the other in the most radical way possible. That's a shame in a way because the film is rather well made and acted but it is obvious war propaganda that supports the theory pretending the world is being manipulated if not controlled by the Israelis, a resurgence of sorts of the old hitlerian anti-semitism of old. I guess some believe that good old hate-theories can always be revived in a way or another, with a little bit of upgrading if necessary.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

Propaganda is hateful, epecially when it smells antisemitic
This film could have been a good one. It came out after 9/11 but before Iraq, at the time of Afghanistan. It is about the "final" confrontation between the USA and Russia. A nuclear terrorist attack is organized in Baltimore so that the USA may believe it comes from the Russians and may start the procedure leading to a full out nuclear war. From the very start the theory that is illustrated here is that terror in the world is organized by the Israeli secret services with the help of some western autonomous adventurers and with the complicity of the hard liners in the Russian and Ukrainian armies. Then the whole story is difficult to believe because of the total lack of real believable hard facts. The American president appears as quite manipulated by his own military personnel and his State and Defense Secretaries, without speaking of the CIA. The Russian president appears just as much manipulated but with maybe a little bit more nerve. The whole plot fails because a small CIA intellectual agent manages to speak to the Russian president directly via the red telephone and make him take the decision to halt his alert, a decision that the US president immediately imitates. How can we believe that. The Weapons of Mass Destruction are quoted in some remote small sentence somewhere unimportant but the propaganda is clear. The various actors of this plot are then eliminated one after the other in the most radical way possible. That's a shame in a way because the film is rather well made and acted but it is obvious war propaganda that supports the theory pretending the world is being manipulated if not controlled by the Israelis, a resurgence of sorts of the old hitlerian anti-semitism of old. I guess some believe that good old hate-theories can always be revived in a way or another, with a little bit of upgrading if necessary.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines