Review of The Killing Fields (1984) by Lord N — 27 Apr 2010

In mid 1975, a man named Saloth Sar took power in a small southeast Asian country that was completely neutral in the war between the United States of America and Communist North Vietnam. he then promised peace and prosperity for all of his people. everyone would be totally equal. he then proceeded to kill of everyone with even half a brain in his country. some estimates of the amount of people that he killed, range as high as 2.2 million in a country full of 7 million people. Saloth Sar is better known by the name of Pol Pot. The country that he took over as leader of the Khmer Rouge (Khmer Rouge meaning Red Khmer with Khmer being the major ethnic group of the country he took over) was Cambodia and this is a movie about the Killing Fields. Oh and by the way, if you do not know who Pol Pt was, look it up NOW. watch this movie NOW. forgive me if I get a tad preachy here, but this is not the sort of event in history that we can afford to forget.

Yes I know, this film didn't win Best Picture so this is a little bit of a deviation from my latest review pattern. although I feel that this film fully deserved to win Best Picture over the sub par period drama about two rival composers, Amadeus.

I was raised my whole life (this is my dad's second favorite movie after The Godfather) being led to believe that this film was extremely brutal. well, in a way that hurt me because I had this level of brutality on the level of Saving Private Ryan and it wasn't that brutal at all. this is not to say that it wasn't brutal. it totally was. what the KR did to gain power is extremely horrifying. this movie truly captures just how horrible it all was. If you were a doctor. you were killed. if you were a lawyer. dead. non Khmer Rouge politician. really dead. student. dead. spoke a language other than Cambodian. dead. journalist. dead. if the Khmer Rouge were bored and needed something to do. dead. you get the idea. The result was that after Pol Pot was no longer in power, there were no smart people left in Cambodia.

Now for the film itself. the acting was really good. I liked John Malcovitch and Sam Waterston a lot. but, the highlight of the film was the Oscar winning performance by the late Haing S. Ngor. he was absolutely amazing. He played Dith Pran, a Cambodian Journalist helping out the main character. he had easily the best performance of the whole movie. the whole movie was overall the best movie of 1984. its brutality and the power behind what the film was about made it an excellent film. Replacement winner for the actual 1984 Best Picture winner, Amadeus.