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The fact that Ben Affleck ended up starring, as Ryan, is the first of many compromises which undermine the movie. Affleck was essentially chosen to make Ryan younger and thus breath new life into the franchise. In the book, Ryan is the Director of the CIA, as opposed to being a rookie analyst with the agency.
What is left of the first 300 pages of the book (as far as I have read) is essentially dealt with during the opening credits. In the book, which has much to say about the Middle East, the villains are Arab terrorists. However, prior to September 11th, Arab Americans (among others) had campaigned against Hollywood's tendency to cast them as the perennial bad guys. "True Lies" was a movie which garnished a lot of criticism for its negative stereotyping of Arabs as terrorists. Political Correctness, always willing to sacrifice truisms, mandated that the villains in the movie be Neo-Nazi's. Apparently the new Hollywood dictum is that bad guys must come from groups without a strong political lobby. This change in villains lessens the impact of the movie and its relevance to today's current reality.
Another concession the movie makes is to the Hollywood blockbuster dogma that the hero needs a love interest. Thus Ryan gets a girlfriend. Poorly written and irrelevant relationships, are akin to gratuitous sex scenes, if they don't advance the plot leave them out. Women should also be offended that Hollywood doesn't think they will watch a movie without such a subplot.
Perhaps, even more damning then a badly written love interest, the movie suffers from a near total lack of character development. This partly explains why a movie based upon the threat of nuclear annihilation left me so unmoved.
Other contributing factors were significant deviations from reality. Tom Clancy, whether you like his books or not, is widely recognized for his attention to detail and accurate description of military and scientific facts. The movie, for all intense and purposes, throws accuracy out with the bath water. Two prime examples of this are 1) Ryan's helicopter gets blown out of the air by the shock wave from the nuclear blast and yet the helicopter's radio still works. It is a relatively well known fact that even running cars, in the blast zone, will cease working due to electromagnetic disruption generated by a nuclear blast. That radio wouldn't work either; and 2) one character who has brief contact with the bomb, prior to detonation, gets radiation poisoning. Amazing, but scientifically inaccurate, especially in light of the fact that Ryan and his girlfriend roam around ground zero without protective clothing and are unharmed.
Dramatically altering the details of a Clancy novel is not new. This occurred in movie version of "The Hunt for Red October" (see Red October Changes). And I am not saying that all movies based on books must adhere rigidly to the original manuscript. However, the deviations are so great here, in the name of crass commercialism, that the substance has been diluted beyond credibility. This may explain why the script had several rewrites and both Harrison Ford and the director of the previous two Clancy films did not end up participating in this latest incarnation.
If you do not see The Sum of All Fears it won't be the end of the world.
Alternate reviews:
http://www.suntimes.com/output/ebert1/wkp-news-sum31.html
MY TOP 10 MOVIES OF 2002 LIST
