The Sum of All Fears | |
---|---|
Directed by | Phil Alden Robinson |
Screenplay by |
|
Based on | The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy |
Produced by | Mace Neufeld |
Starring | |
Cinematography | John Lindley |
Edited by |
|
Music by | Jerry Goldsmith |
Production companies |
|
Distributed by | Paramount Pictures |
Release dates |
|
Running time | 124 minutes [1] |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $68 million |
Box office | $194 million [2] |
The Sum of All Fears is a 2002 American spy thriller film directed by Phil Alden Robinson, based on Tom Clancy's 1991 novel of the same name. The film, which is set in the Jack Ryan film series, is a reboot taking place in 2002. Jack Ryan is portrayed as a younger character by Ben Affleck, in comparison with the previous films: The Hunt for Red October (1990) starring Alec Baldwin as Jack Ryan and the sequels, Patriot Games (1992) and Clear and Present Danger (1994), both starring Harrison Ford in the role.
An Austrian Neo-Nazi plans to trigger a nuclear war between the United States and Russia, so that he can establish a fascist superstate in Europe. After the Neo-Nazi's scientists build a secret nuclear weapon that is detonated in Baltimore, and a rogue Russian officer paid off by the Neo-Nazi attacks a U.S. aircraft carrier, the world's superpowers are pushed close to the brink of war. CIA analyst Jack Ryan (Affleck) is the only person who realizes that the Baltimore bomb was a black market weapon, not a Russian one. With the clock ticking, Ryan has to find a way to stop the impending nuclear war.
The film was a co-production between the motion picture studios of Paramount Pictures, Mace Neufeld Productions, MFP Munich Film Partners, and S.O.A.F. Productions. On June 4, 2002, the original motion picture soundtrack was released by the Elektra Records music label. The soundtrack was composed and orchestrated by musician Jerry Goldsmith. The movie premiered in theaters in the United States on May 31, 2002.
The Sum of All Fears received mixed reviews from critics but was a financial success, having a worldwide theatrical run of $193.9 million compared to its production budget of $68 million and related marketing costs.
In 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, an Israeli warplane carrying a nuclear bomb is shot down. In 2002, a Syrian scrap collector named Ghazi uncovers the unexploded bomb buried in a field in the Golan Heights. He sells it to South African black market arms trafficker Derek Olson, who recognizes it as the bomb that was lost during that war. He then sells it to a neo-nazi group led by Austrian billionaire Richard Dressler, whose aim is to start a war between the United States and Russia that will devastate them both, and leave a united fascist Europe to rule the world.
CIA analyst Jack Ryan is summoned by Director William Cabot to accompany him to Moscow to meet new Russian President Alexander Nemerov. There, Cabot and Ryan are allowed to examine a Russian nuclear weapons facility as prescribed by the START treaty, where Ryan notices the absence of three scientists listed on the facility's roster. After receiving reliable intelligence from a confidential secure informant inside the Kremlin, codenamed "Spinnaker", Cabot sends operative John Clark to Russia to investigate. Clark tracks the missing scientists to a former Soviet military facility in Ukraine, where Cabot suspects they are building a secret nuclear weapon that Russia could use without any method to trace it back to them; Russian and U.S. relations are strained due to Russia's war in Chechnya.
Ryan and his colleagues discern that a crate from the facility in Ukraine was flown to the Canary Islands, then sent to Baltimore on a cargo ship. Ryan warns Cabot, who is attending a football game in the city with U.S. President Robert Fowler, about the bomb threat. Fowler is evacuated before the bomb detonates, but the stadium is destroyed and Cabot is mortally wounded. Worsening matters, a corrupt Russian Air Force general who has been paid by Dressler sends warplanes to attack a U.S. aircraft carrier, heavily damaging it and leading the U.S. to believe that Russia perpetrated the nuclear bombing.
Ryan learns from a radiation assessment team that the isotopic signature from the nuclear blast indicates it was manufactured in the U.S., evidence which seems to exonerate Russia. In Syria, Clark tracks down Ghazi, now dying of radiation exposure. He tells Clark that he sold the bomb to Olson, who lives in Damascus. Ryan's colleagues at Langley infiltrate Olson's computer and download files that implicate Dressler as the person who bought the plutonium and is behind the nuclear attack.
Ryan is able to reach the National Military Command Center in The Pentagon and get a message to Nemerov, saying that he knows that Russia was not behind the attack, while also asking Nemerov to unilaterally stand down his forces as a show of good faith. Nemerov agrees to do so as Fowler follows suit. The attack's perpetrators, including Olson and Dressler, are assassinated. Fowler and Nemerov announce new measures to counter nuclear proliferation in joint speeches at the White House, as Ryan and his fiancée Dr. Catherine Muller listen in. Spinnaker, who is revealed to be Nemerov's senior advisor Anatoly Grushkov, gives Catherine a gift for their engagement.
In 1991, Paramount Pictures negotiated with Tom Clancy for the rights to adapt The Sum of All Fears, but the talks stalled after he became reluctant to concede film rights to further works due to his dissatisfaction with the adaptation of Patriot Games . [3] Clancy ultimately agreed after he reached a large cash settlement with the studio president Brandon Tartikoff. However, producer Mace Neufeld was not enthusiastic to adapt the book after the release of Clear and Present Danger in 1994 due to its similarities with the story of Black Sunday and concerns over depicting controversial subjects such as terrorism and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. [4] A year was spent developing Tom Clancy's The Cardinal of the Kremlin before the material was deemed too difficult to adapt. [5] An adaptation of Debt of Honor or a new screenplay unrelated to any of Clancy's books was also considered. [4]
In October 1999, Harrison Ford announced that the next Jack Ryan novel being scripted into a film would indeed be The Sum of All Fears and that "hopefully we'll get that to a place where we can make a movie." [6] During this time, writer Akiva Goldsman wrote multiple drafts of the script. [7] However, on June 8, 2000, it was announced that Ford had dropped out of the film after he and director Phillip Noyce were unable to work out script problems. [8] It was later announced that Ben Affleck would take on the role in a $10 million deal that would see the series rebooted with Jack Ryan portrayed at an earlier stage in life. "The day I received the offer to play Jack Ryan, I was filming a Pearl Harbor scene with Alec Baldwin. He was very sweet and said I should do it," said Affleck. "I wouldn't have done the movie without talking to Harrison Ford first. He gave me his blessing. That's what I needed to hear." [9] Months after Affleck became attached to the project, director Phil Alden Robinson was brought on to lead it. [10]
While the basic plot is the same in the movie as in the book, there were significant changes. Noting these substantial changes, in the commentary track on the DVD release, Tom Clancy jokingly introduced himself as "the author of the book that he [director Phil Alden Robinson, who is present with Clancy] ignored" and spending most of the commentary poking fun at the film's factual inaccuracies and differences from the source material. [11] Perhaps the largest change were the original terrorists. In the novel, they were Arab nationalists, but in the film, they were changed to neo-Nazis. A common misconception is that this was done as a reaction to the September 11, 2001, attacks, but the movie finished filming in June 2001.[ citation needed ]
On the "making-of" DVD extra, director Alden Robinson said that the change was purely for elements relating to the plot, because Arab terrorists would not be able to plausibly accomplish all that was necessary for the story to work. In addition, the terrorists in the book received significant aid from elements in East Germany, a country which had ceased to exist before the novel was even published. The group Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) did mount a two-year lobbying campaign that ended on January 26, 2001, against using "Muslim villains", as the original book version did. [12]
Screenwriter Dan Pyne claimed that the decision to not use Arab terrorists was "possibly because that has become a cliché. At the time that I started writing The Sum of All Fears, Jörg Haider was just starting to come into play in Austria. And simultaneous with that, I think, there was some neo-nationalist activity in Holland, and there was stuff going on in Spain and in Italy. So it seemed like a logical and lasting idea that would be universal." [13] It has also been noted that a larger percent of profits stems from international audiences, and US filmmakers work to avoid alienating large segments of this customer base. [13]
Principal photography for The Sum of All Fears began on February 12, 2001, in Montreal, Quebec. [14] A majority of the film was shot in Montreal, including the sequences at the football game that were shot in the city's Olympic Stadium. [15] Additional filming was done at the Diefenbunker in Ottawa, Ontario. [16] Production finished in June 2001. [5] The interior scene of the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis was filmed on a set used in the television series JAG . [17]
The US Army provided fighter jets, helicopters, ground vehicles and soldiers for the film, while National Airborne Operations Center and the CIA served as on-set advisors for filming in Montreal. The Pentagon disliked a scene where a carrier was blown up due to the impression they believed it gave, as a result the scene was rewritten. [18]
The musical score to The Sum of All Fears is composed by Jerry Goldsmith. A soundtrack album was released on June 4, 2002, by Elektra Records. [19] In addition to Goldsmith's score, the soundtrack also includes source music such as "If We Get Through This" by Tabitha Fair and "Nessun dorma" by Giacomo Puccini. There are also two tracks from the album ("If We Could Remember" and "The Mission") that are vocal interpretations of Goldsmith's primary theme co-written by singer-songwriter Paul Williams. [20] On March 12, 2014, an expanded edition was released by La-La Land Records. [21]
The Sum of All Fears (Music from the Motion Picture) | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
Film score by | ||||
Released | June 4, 2002 (original), March 12, 2014 (expanded) | |||
Length | 49:30 (original), 78:48 (expanded) | |||
Label | Elektra (original), La-La Land (expanded) | |||
Jack Ryan soundtrack chronology | ||||
|
No. | Title | Length |
---|---|---|
1. | "If We Could Remember" | 3:30 |
2. | "The Mission" | 5:57 |
3. | "The Bomb" | 2:55 |
4. | "That Went Well" | 2:45 |
5. | "Clear the Stadium" | 1:33 |
6. | "If We Get Through This" | 3:36 |
7. | "The Deal" | 2:34 |
8. | "Changes" | 2:27 |
9. | "Snap Count" | 2:12 |
10. | "His Name Is Olson" | 1:51 |
11. | "Nessun Dorma from Turandot" | 2:58 |
12. | "Deserted Lab" | 1:52 |
13. | "Real Time" | 2:51 |
14. | "How Close?" | 6:05 |
15. | "The Same Air" | 2:01 |
16. | "If We Could Remember (Reprise)" | 3:34 |
Total length: | 49:30 |
No. | Title | Length |
---|---|---|
1. | "The Mission" | 5:56 |
2. | "Do It!/I'll Go/The Bomb" | 4:35 |
3. | "14 Months/The Deal" | 4:05 |
4. | "Thanks a Lot/That Went Well" | 3:22 |
5. | "The Shipment/Moscow Time" | 1:16 |
6. | "Nice Going/The Docks" | 3:36 |
7. | "Mrs. Spassky/The Lab" | 2:10 |
8. | "The Reservoir/Night Landing/Deserted Lab" | 3:34 |
9. | "Shoot Him/Changes" | 3:16 |
10. | "Clear the Stadium (film version)/Not the Russians/Man Your Aircraft" | 4:24 |
11. | "Further Aggressions/State of War" | 2:53 |
12. | "Supplies/To the Docks" | 2:02 |
13. | "Real Time" | 2:50 |
14. | "Cabot Is Dead/His Name Is Olson" | 2:50 |
15. | "Snap Count" | 2:11 |
16. | "Maximum Readiness/Get a Doctor" | 1:57 |
17. | "How Close?" | 6:08 |
18. | "The Same Air" | 3:16 |
19. | "If We Could Remember" | 3:36 |
20. | " Star-Spangled Banner " | 1:55 |
21. | "Nessun Dorma from Turandot " | 2:57 |
22. | "The Mission (synth choir)" | 4:31 |
23. | "Clear the Stadium (album version)" | 1:31 |
24. | "His Name Is Olson (alt. with synth choir)" | 1:50 |
25. | "Theme from The Sum of All Fears (synth demo)" | 2:13 |
Total length: | 78:48 |
While the film was speculated to be released in late 2001, The Sum of All Fears was theatrically released on May 31, 2002. Many media outlets characterized this apparent change in release date to be a delay due to the September 11 attacks. Addressing the release date, director Phil Alden Robinson said, "When I came on board in August of 2000, they said, 'This is a Summer-of-2002 picture.'" [10] As the first film released since September 11 to deal so vividly with terrorism, critics believed it to be too alarming to be released nine months after the attacks. [22] [23]
The Sum of All Fears was released on DVD and VHS on October 29, 2002. [24]
The Sum of All Fears received mixed reviews. Rotten Tomatoes reported that 59% of critics gave the film positive reviews and that the average rating was 5.90/10 based on a total of 176 reviews counted. The consensus was that the film was "A slick and well-made thriller that takes on new weight due to the current political climate." [25] At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average out of 100 to critics' reviews, The Sum of All Fears received a score of 45 based on 35 reviews. [26]
Peter Travers criticized Affleck's performance, saying it "merely creates an outline for a role he still needs to grow into, a role that Harrison Ford effortlessly filled with authority." [27] Richard Roeper felt the film "is almost impossible to follow – and there's something cringe-inducing about seeing an American football stadium nuked as pop entertainment." Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune called it "an implausible apocalypse without depth or resonance", [28] while Peter Rainer of New York magazine felt the "movie has been upstaged by the sum of our fears." [29]
"There are some frightening special effects in the movie, which I will not describe, because their unexpected appearance has such an effect."
A few positive reviews came from The Argus , who praised Freeman for giving "the William Cabot character such validity." [31] Roger Ebert awarded the film 3.5 out of 4, stars and felt that "the use of the neo-Nazis is politically correct: Best to invent villains who won't offend any audiences." He also said that "Jack Ryan's one-man actions in post-bomb Baltimore are unlikely and way too well-timed." [30] Ebert was not alone in disparaging the recasting of the novel's Arab terrorist villains as Neo-Nazis. [32] [33]
In Reel Power: Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy , author Matthew Alford observed that the American political characters in the film act benevolently, declaring "When the President and his advisers do apply force it is with heavy hearts and purely as a way of demonstrating 'deterrence' in the hope that this will encourage the Russians to back down. They never apply excessive violence and are ultimately successful — with Ryan’s help — in avoiding nuclear warfare." Furthermore, he argued that "the film celebrates and makes light of the enormous covert powers of a globally operating US national security state and its allies." [34]
Ed Gonzalez of Slant magazine took issue with the film's violent content, especially as it was released not long after the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US. [35]
The Sum of All Fears made $31.1 million during its opening weekend, ranking in first place at the box office, beating Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones . [36] According to Box Office Mojo, the film made U.S. $118,907,036 and $75,014,336 in foreign totals, easily recovering its $68 million production costs. [2]
The film won a Visual Effects Society Award for "Best Supporting Visual Effects in a Motion Picture." The recipients were Glenn Neufeld, Derek Spears, Dan Malvin, and Al DiSarro. [37]
Thomas Leo Clancy Jr. was an American novelist. He is best known for his technically detailed espionage and military-science storylines set during and after the Cold War. Seventeen of his novels have been bestsellers and more than 100 million copies of his books have been sold. His name was also used on screenplays written by ghostwriters, nonfiction books on military subjects occasionally with co-authors, and video games. He was a part-owner of his hometown Major League Baseball team, the Baltimore Orioles, and vice-chairman of their community activities and public affairs committees.
The Hunt for Red October is the debut novel by American author Tom Clancy, first published on October 1, 1984, by the Naval Institute Press. It depicts Soviet submarine captain Marko Ramius as he seemingly goes rogue with his country's cutting-edge ballistic missile submarine Red October, and marks the first appearance of Clancy's most popular fictional character, Jack Ryan, an analyst working for the Central Intelligence Agency, as he must prove his theory that Ramius is intending to defect to the United States.
John Patrick Ryan Sr. (Hon.), nicknamed Jack, is a fictional character created by author Tom Clancy and featured in his Ryanverse novels, which have consistently topped the New York Times bestseller list over 30 years. Since Clancy's death in 2013, five other authors, Mark Greaney, Grant Blackwood, Mike Maden, Marc Cameron and Don Bentley, have continued writing new novels for the franchise and its other connecting series with the approval of the Clancy family estate.
John T. Clark is a fictional character created by Tom Clancy. He has been featured in many of his Ryanverse novels. Although he first appeared in The Cardinal of the Kremlin (1988), his origin story was detailed in Without Remorse (1993).
Executive Orders is a techno-thriller novel, written by Tom Clancy and released on July 1, 1996. It picks up immediately where the final events of Debt of Honor (1994) left off, and features now-U.S. President Jack Ryan as he tries to deal with foreign and domestic threats. The book is dedicated to former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, who helped launch Clancy's worldwide success as a novelist. The book debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list.
The Sum of All Fears is a political thriller novel, written by Tom Clancy and released on August 14, 1991, as the sequel to Clear and Present Danger (1989). Main character Jack Ryan, who is now the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, tries to stop a crisis concerning the Middle East peace process wherein Palestinian and former East German terrorists conspire to bring the United States and Soviet Union into nuclear war. It debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list.
Kathryn Bridget Moynahan is an American actress and former model. She graduated from Longmeadow High School in Massachusetts in 1989 and began pursuing a career in modeling. Moynahan appeared in department-store catalogs and magazines, and after doing television commercials, began taking acting lessons. She made her television debut in a guest appearance in the comedy series Sex and the City in 1999, where she later had a recurring role as Natasha.
Patriot Games is a thriller novel, written by Tom Clancy and published in July 1987. Without Remorse, released six years later, is an indirect prequel, and it is chronologically the first book featuring Jack Ryan, the main character in most of Clancy's novels. The novel focuses on Ryan being the target of Irish terrorist group Ulster Liberation Army for thwarting their kidnapping attempt on the Prince and Princess of Wales in London. It debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. A film adaptation, starring Harrison Ford as Ryan, premiered on June 5, 1992.
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear is a 1999 tactical first-person shooter video game developed and published by Red Storm Entertainment for Microsoft Windows, with later ports for the Dreamcast, Mac OS, PlayStation, and Game Boy Advance. The sequel to 1998's Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, it is the second installment in the Rainbow Six series and the last to be published by Red Storm before its acquisition by Ubi Soft in 2000. The game's plot follows the secret international counterterrorist organization Rainbow as they investigate nuclear terrorism in Eastern Europe.
The Sum of All Fears is a 2002 tactical shooter video game which is developed by Red Storm Entertainment and published by Ubi Soft. It was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 2 and GameCube, based on the Ghost Recon game engine; another version was released for the Game Boy Advance.
The Hunt for Red October is a 1990 American submarine spy thriller film directed by John McTiernan, produced by Mace Neufeld, and starring Sean Connery, Alec Baldwin, Scott Glenn, James Earl Jones, and Sam Neill. The film is an adaptation of Tom Clancy's 1984 bestselling novel of the same name. It is the first installment of the film series with the protagonist Jack Ryan.
The Mark-12 nuclear bomb was a lightweight nuclear bomb designed and manufactured by the United States which was built starting in 1954 and which saw service from then until 1962.
World War III, sometimes abbreviated to WWIII, is a common theme in popular culture. Since the 1940s, countless books, films, and television programmes have used the theme of nuclear weapons and a third global war. The presence of the Soviet Union as an international rival armed with nuclear weapons created persistent fears in the United States and vice versa of a nuclear World War III, and popular culture at the time reflected those fears. The theme was also a way of exploring a range of issues beyond nuclear war in the arts. U.S. historian Spencer R. Weart called nuclear weapons a "symbol for the worst of modernity."
Morris "Mace" Alvin Neufeld was an American film and television producer. Born in New York City, Neufeld began working in the entertainment industry as a songwriter and production assistant in the late 1940s and then as a talent agent, managing comics, actors, musicians and writers, including Don Adams, Don Knotts, Neil Diamond, and the Carpenters. He began producing for television in the 1970s and in 1981 was nominated for a primetime Emmy for the TV movie East of Eden.
The Ryanverse is a term for the political thriller media franchise created by author Tom Clancy centering on the character of Jack Ryan and the fictional universe featuring Jack and other characters, such as John Clark and Domingo Chavez.
Dead or Alive is a techno-thriller novel, written by Tom Clancy and co-written with Grant Blackwood, and released on December 7, 2010. It is Clancy's first novel in seven years after The Teeth of the Tiger (2003), and follows the hunt by The Campus for "the Emir", a Middle Eastern terrorist based on Osama bin Laden. It unites several characters from the Ryanverse, including former president Jack Ryan, his son Jack Ryan Jr., his nephews Dominic and Brian Caruso, and Rainbow Six veterans John Clark and Domingo Chavez. The book debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list.
Locked On is a techno-thriller novel written by Tom Clancy and Mark Greaney released on December 13, 2011. A direct sequel to Dead or Alive (2010), it is Clancy's first of three collaborations with Greaney and features Jack Ryan Jr. and The Campus as they try to avert a nuclear threat from a rogue Pakistani general, as well as his father Jack Sr. in his presidential campaign. The book debuted at number two on the New York Times bestseller list.
The Jack Ryan franchise consists of American action-thriller installments, based on the fictional titular character from a series of novels written by Tom Clancy. Various actors have portrayed the role.
Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is a 2014 American action drama film based on the character Jack Ryan created by author Tom Clancy. It is the fifth film in the Jack Ryan series and the second reboot thereof. Unlike its predecessors, it is not an adaptation of a particular Clancy novel, but rather an original story. Chris Pine stars in the title role, becoming the fourth actor to play Ryan, following Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, and Ben Affleck. The film is directed by Kenneth Branagh, who also stars alongside Kevin Costner, and Keira Knightley.
The following is a complete list of books published by Tom Clancy, an American author of contemporary spy fiction and military fiction.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)