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Dir: Ed Zwick Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Djimon Hounsou, Jennifer Connelly Shockingly, there are currently 200,000 child soldiers in Africa. Children as young as six smoking, drinking and wielding guns, stolen from their families and brainwashed into rebel soldiers. The illegal trade of “conflict” diamonds from Sierra Leone is another matter that makes my blood run cold. Kanye West mentioned it through the medium of music and, now, director Edward Zwick confronts the issue further. Set against the backdrop of the chaos and civil war that enveloped 1990’s Sierra Leone, Blood Diamond is the story of Danny Archer (DiCaprio) an ex-mercenary from Zimbabwe, and Solomon Vandy (Hounsou), a Mende fisherman. Both men are African, but their histories and circumstances are as different as any can be until their fates become entwined in a common quest to recover a rare pink diamond, the kind of stone that can transform a life...or end it.
Visually the film is first-rate. Filmed on location in Africa,
the settings range from breathtaking beauty to heartbreaking
squalor and each are astonishing in their own way. Although at times I felt that the music went too far in terms of sentimentality and national identity, the excellent editing more than made up for it. The fast-cutting was as frenetic as the gunfire and portrayed the chaos to perfection. DiCaprio was linguistically superb. My intitial expectations of a poor South African accent quickly turned into admiration at the work he must of put in vocally to master the speech patterns, timing and intonation. That is worth his Oscar nod alone. As a character that you couldn’t trust to be good or bad, DiCaprio was more than capable. Connelly never had a chance to show what she can do in a problematic role but Djimon Hounsou was simply breathtaking. He played the role with such passion that you truly felt every inch of his joy, sadness and anger. It will be a travesty if he does not win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. An unbelievably amazing performance.
The plot was very interesting; juxtaposing a man obsessed with a
valuable diamond with a man who saw no Above everything else, though, are the issues at the core of the movie. From the outside looking in, Africa is awash with problems that won’t be solved with a one-off concert or complete boycott of diamonds. What we can do is ask for proof that the rock we are buying is not a “conflict” diamond. However, given that the organisers of the Oscars have controversially told guests to specifically wear them, this maybe like drawing blood from a stone...or a diamond. Good film, powerful message.
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greater
value than his family. 
