Repudiating Bruce Willis’ Tears of the Sun

I should have gone fishing or skinny-dipping or window-shopping for that matter. I should have broken my resolution to abstain from clubbing… in fact, I should have done anything but sit through Bruce Willis’ latest yarn of an action movie. The experience was exasperating in its milder parts, and revolting at its crudest. I should have been watching SNL reruns.

Tears of the Sun is another Hollywood attempt to nurture the notion held by more than a few Americans (and, even more largely, Westerners) that Africa is one huge jungle, where man and beast co-exist in close proximity, and whose people are incapable of conducting the business of government without resorting to wanton massacre. Of course, it’s largely a matter of capitalism: Hollywood churns out features that sell, and features that align themselves with romanticized notions happen to sell very well. It’s a matter of giving people what they want, what reaffirms their smug convictions, and whatever makes them declare in self-adulation, ‘there goes us but for the grace of God’.

In the approximately ninety-minute feature, an “African nation” represented as Nigeria is portrayed as a massive forest (which, coincidentally, fits snugly into the West’s notion of Africa). “Nigerian” politics is reduced to a primordial tribal bloodbath perpetuated by the “Fulanis” against the “Ibos.”

Supposedly, the “Ibo” President (who, it appears, holds a part time job as a “tribal king” of sorts) is murdered by “Fulani rebels.” His son, who is “heir” to “the throne,” suddenly becomes the burden of the U.S. Navy SEALS dispatched to extract an American doctor from the “hostile” region. The juxtaposition of “presidency” and “tribal kingship” in one single man is an anachronism at best, and an aberration at worst. The variant of tribal politics depicted would have been more appropriately ascribed to another time and place.

At the very least, the plot could have been based on a fictitious nation, like Coming to America’s “Zamunda”—although this approach does not altogether address the fundamental issue at hand. Because it arbitrarily uses “Nigeria” as a label for its pitiful contrivance, Tears of the Sun is abrasive, offensive, and insolent. Additionally, it betrays the ignorance of the writers. (There are no “kings”, per se, among the Ibos, for a start.)

The people in the movie were most assuredly not Nigerians, the “native” language spoken was decidedly not a Nigerian language (and I might contend was not even a real language at all), none of the sound tracks had the faintest connection to a Nigerian ethnic group, and the quixotic jungle location was, I’ll bet, not anywhere near the Nigerian geographical space. So the epistemological question, then, is: why ascribe such an obnoxious plot to Nigeria?

To have people represented as Nigerians clad in tattered rags, referred to as refugees, and benevolently offered bits of American soldier food made me feel like running to the front of the theatre to repudiate, on the spot, the movie’s premise. If not for the release of the exasperation caused by the assault on Nigeria, I would have at least disabused the minds of viewers of the assault on their collective intelligence and sensibilities.

In the end, we are left with the impression that, once again, the caucasoid demigod has succeeded in saving the confounded African negroid from himself, as the helicopters rise in messianic ascension into the clouds. Indeed, the scene was reminiscent of the very Christ ascending into heaven, after saving wretched man from eternal damnation.

Tears of the Sun does nothing but unleash a demeaning onslaught on an African nation, and an unflattering abuse on the minds of a generation of Americans, with misrepresentations of the social and political realities of today’s Nigeria.

And, oh, the movie, if I were to assume the role of movie critic for a moment, has no real morals, hinges on warped principles, and would be receiving a rather charitable assessment if it were compared to, say, Schwarzeneggar’s Commando (which, itself, was a bad movie). Tears of the Sun is, to put it as it is, a lie.

My only regret is that my $9 (price of movie ticket) goes towards enriching a band of lying connivers.