Journal 5: Blood Diamonds Review; Sydney Alspach

In the film, Blood Diamonds, there is a lot of horror and insanity shown through out the film. The main point of this film is that there are diamonds in Africa and people will search for them and sell them to other country's to make a profit. However this is highly illegal in Africa. There are people called the rebels, which capture people from villages that they burnt down and have them work for them or they kill the people. The rebels take a father named Solomon Vandy and have him search for diamonds. If any one would have found a diamond that are supposed to give it to the leader of the rebels. If they found a diamond and didn't give it to him and he found out or saw that they had it he would kill that person. Solomon found the biggest diamond that had ever been seen in Africa, and he dug a whole in the ground and buried it in the ground. This is when the whole movie begun because now the African army had taken them all to jail and Danny got Solomon out of jail. 

This movie relates to the book "A Long Way Gone" because in both the film and book there are children who have to learn to be independent and how to survive on there own. The kids in this film are forced to murder innocent people, it is so messed up and insane to me as a viewer to see how awful the world really can be. This film also relates to the villagers being attacked just like in the book. 

In this picture Solomon is looking at his children that are being kept by the African Army. 

The review in the New York times says its a foolish thiller film. I  think they said this because it is such a dramatic film to begin with. The New York Times does a great job getting all of the main plots of the movie into their review. "Good as gold, Solomon earns a sizable share of screen time, and though the performance is expectedly sympathetic, the character has none of Danny’s complexity, which means that he’s inherently less interesting."(New York Times) This really symbolizes and shows how Solomon is in this film. Overall I really enjoyed watching this film it really gave me a different perspective on diamonds.