I have just seen this. Very powerful. The opening 2 minutes is one of the best openings for a movie and sets the tone just right. Cage is perfect for the role. I couldn't feel sorry for the wife, she was OK with "not knowing" what her husband was doing for a living. I had a hard time to determine the category of the film, it is listed as political drama, but there are plenty of humor, (black humor) in it. Some interesting trivia: According to Andrew Niccol, the filmmakers worked with actual gunrunners in the making of the film. The tanks lined up for sale were owned by a gunrunner who had to have them back to sell to another country. They used a real stockpile of over 3,000 AK-47s because it was cheaper than getting prop guns. The gunrunners were more cooperative and efficient than the studio or the crew. Yuri Orlov is a composite of five real arms dealers. No US studios would back the film. Foreign finances were secured instead. The tanks seen in the movie were real and belonged to a Czech arms-dealer. Before shooting the scene where tanks were lined up for sale, the filmmaker had to warn NATO, lest they think a real war was being started when they see satellite images of the set.
Yes! I just recommended that one: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=64892&perpage=6&pagenumber=3 I'm what you could call a 'gun nut'. ( also: Archery nut, medieval weaponry nut, you get the picture.) The opening sequence tracking a sole bullet from the factory, through various middlemen, into the hands of African militiamen, and finally straight into the head of a young boy... well it's brilliant, but at that point I feared the movie would be too anti-gun for me to enjoy it much. Nevertheless, political correctness didn't really get in the way of this film shining brightly. So many cool touches, like the psychopathic son of a Liberian warlord with his gold plated machine gun and entourage of sluts... That's just classic. It's a must see, unless you have too much 'heart' to tolerate a bad guy protagonist and so much casual murder. I don't have that problem. It's not my war...
Export-import.... I liked when the dictator corrected Cage's use of words (bloodbath-bath of blood, warlord-lord of war) and it made more sense the way how he used it...
By curious coincidence, I just now finished watching this movie, not 3 minutes ago. Not bad. Cage kinda looks like a freak and it takes some time to settle into seeing him as a relatively sane guy. But he did an outstanding job in this role, IMO. Are AK-47s really that awesome? Seems hard to believe.
Yes, they're that reliable. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=58634&perpage=6&highlight=uzi&pagenumber=4 "At one stage of the work, one of the dozers uncovered the decomposed body of an enemy soldier, complete with AK-47. I happened to be standing right there, looking on with a number of my troops. I jumped down into the hole and pulled the AK out of the bog. "Watch this, guys," I said, "and I'll show you how a real infantry weapon works." I pulled the bolt back and fired thirty rounds -- the AK could have been cleaned that day rather than buried in glug for a year or so. That was the kind of weapon our soldiers needed, not the confidence-sapping M-16."