Review of The Killing Fields (1984) by Zane T — 18 Feb 2009

With the Khmer Rouge tribunals having started, this movie is an inside look at what many Cambodians went through under the Pol Pot's tyrannical power. The biggest misconception about this movie is that it's a war movie or that it's about an American journalist in Cambodia.

No, it is a story about Dith Pran and how he survived while others around him died. Haing S. Ngor survived the Cambodian genocide only to be gunned down years later. His performance as Pran mirrors his own.

Ngor does a lot of good acting, considering he was never an actor, but a doctor. I liked that this movie switches gears halfway and tells about Pran's struggles as he tries to escape Cambodia. It's horrible enough that Cambodians massacred Cambodians just for the fact they were too "westernized," but worse that anybody could do this to another person.

If violence makes you uncomfortable, don't see this. But what director Roland Joffe does is not show us some violence. We hear gunshots off screen. Maybe that's worse, because we see other people's reactions.

Granted the whole scene at the end where Pran and Shneeberg are reunited at a Red Cross camp while John Lennon's "Imagine" is playing on the soundtrack is cheesy and the last line, "There's nothing to forgive" seems to be add for dramatic purpose.

But the rest of the movie and the great acting by John Malkovich, Julian Sands and Sam Waterston makes it worth that little mulligan. This is one of the best movies of the 1980's if not one of the most important movies ever made.