Journal 5 Blood Diamond Review By Daniel

The movie Blood Diamond takes place in Sierra Leone during the civil war in 1999. There are three main characters in the film, Solomon a fisherman who is trying to find his family, Danny the diamond smuggler, and Maddy they journalist that is trying to write a story about the illegal diamond smuggling going on. Solomon and Danny meet in jail and after Danny hears rumors of a pink diamond Solomon hid while working in the rebel diamond mine. He sees this as his ticket out of Africa and gets Solomon out of jail. The two end up working together to find the diamond and Solomon's family. In order to travel to get to the diamond Danny makes a deal with Maddy to provided information about the diamond smuggling. The diamonds the rebels are finding are being used to aid the war and causing massive bloodshed in Africa tearing the country apart.

The movie shows how the country has fallen apart because of illegal trade of diamonds. Many families are separated, killed, or forced to work in the mines and become soldiers. Solomonds son faces the fate as becoming a solider for the RUF. His son kills innocent people and has been brainwashed to think hes doing the right thing. It is really sad seeing so many young people turned into these killers. The diamond smugglers only care money they bring in for the diamonds but don't value the human life that it took to get the diamond. Danny however started out as the typical diamond smuggler but had a change of heart towards the end of the movie. When Danny was dying from the gun shot he gave back the diamond to Solomon and told him to sell it and bring his family out of Africa. With Danny's information given to Maddy about the illegal diamonds this brought the end to the civil war.

Solomon finds a pink diamond and hides it.

The common link of this movie and A Long Way Gone is the use of boy soldiers. We see how the boys act when they kill for the first time and the amount of drugs each is on. When the rebels attack the village so many people try and escape but most are killed just like in the book. The only difference is Solomon's son is fighting for the RUF and Beah is fighting against the RUF.

I would recommend this film to be watched. It is an eye opener of a whole country being effected by diamonds just so that we can have rings with big sparkling diamonds on them. This movie has a lot of fighting scenes and sad ones like when Danny calls Maddy before he dies. In most of the reviews they saw this movie as good and a must watch. Some of them didn't like the ending because it follows the typically happy ending. I thought the end was good and glad to see Solomon testify. There was one review inpractical I agree with what they are saying. The review by Spiritually Practices writes, "Blood Diamond is as important as any film we've seen over the years about the Holocaust. It shares with them the vital message: We must not let this happen again". If we don't learn from our mistakes what happen in Sierra Leone will happen again.