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xaipe
Oct 30, 2014xaipe rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
The Killing Fields is the best war movie ever made in my opinion. It was released in 1984, but it not at all dated in its style or subject. It's a British film with American Sam Waterston as one of the main characters playing a journalist during the mid-1970's war in Cambodia which was an extension of the Korean War when Prince Norodom Sihanouk was deposed and replaced by pro-US General Lon Nol and the ensuing murderous regime of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge. As a war movie, it stands out as having few pulse-pounding battle scenes but the ones which we do see are horrifyingly real. The story was told mainly from the point of view of Dith Pran, a Cambodian journalist who assisted British and American journalists as a translator and guide. The story has the advantage of being told in a time before "embedded journalists" were the norm and recounts the beginning of the US succession of continual, endless global wars. The cast could not be better. Dith Pran was played by Dr. Haing S. Ngor whose subtly shifting expressions were a kaleidoscope of love and suffering, smaller parts were played by John Malkovich, Spalding Gray, Bill Paterson, and Patrick Malahide. It's hard to imagine how this movie could have been improved.