Blood Diamond

The horrific way that people sometimes treat one another over the stupidest things always amazes me as I get older and look back at the world I've lived in. Even though I had heard news reports, and read articles, about the way invaders had treated the villagers in Africa and their own people over ivory, gold, diamonds, I have never seen an accurate portrayal of the brutality that was asserted on these people. This film is set in Sierra Leone during its civil war in 1999, and comes across with all of the viciousness and suffering that can only truly be a small glimpse into the experience these people had to endure.
Following the money, a diamond smuggler, Danny Archer, cons a frantic father searching for his son, into showing him where a rare pink diamond is in order to help find the missing boy. Leonardo DiCaprio and Djimon Hounsou give such powerful performances here that that you can understand why they both earned nods from the Academy. The search for the young boy is the main part of the storyline but there is no real way of separating that from the civil war story and what it did to the country and its people. There are no punches pulled within the story, everything is as graphic and true to life as possible, even the mutilations of the villagers that resisted against the rebels.
The issues that are being examined in this film are to this day very real problems, the buying and selling of conflict/blood diamonds costs not only the lives of the people who are killed in those countries but ultimately the souls of the people who buy, sell and wear these diamonds. After watching this film I have a new respect for DiCaprio's work, seeing him in this role, to me, brought out the genuine actor that has slowly been coming to the surface. From here on I'll be watching to see what he does next, and hopefully it will be a project that will do his craft justice, and be something that we will all want to see like this one.