I just watched this old movie all the way from 2005. First of all it's still worth a watch despite how old it is. A lot of old movies are still worth watching even today so that's a great place to look if you've not looked there already and especially if you're done binge watching all the more modern stuff you're interested in.
So I happened on Lord of War, I was mostly interested because it had the legend Nicolas Cage on it, and the whole thing about arms and war was so great especially as it was international and a lot of countries were involved.
They did a really great job by showing how it went down on the international arms dealership scene which is doubtless a very interesting scene. It was great to see how it reacted to the historical events we all know like the Cold War, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the African wars, etc.
These events were seen through a very interesting and illuminating light this way and that was a huge upside.
But..
With all of these something really huge was missing.
The main character, an arms dealer seemed to become a big time arms dealer overnight. We didn't see how he really began and there was an attempt to show how he began, but a very poor attempt, that's the problem. Maybe it would have been better they didn't make the attempt at all. But they did and they botched it.
They showed him starting from the bottom as a struggling young man with little to no money. Then he decided to start selling guns. He got his first gun and sold it, a good depiction of his start but before we knew it he was an international arms dealer flying from country to country.
How did he get so big? What came next after his first gun sale? How did he get his first international buyers? How did he get his first huge supplies of arms? How did he get the first planes that took him out the country to sell?
These seemed like very interesting parts of the movie that never got shown. After watching his first sale I was hungry to see how he forged forward and built his brand, but that never came. The movie just went on like a proverbial case of ignoring the elephant in the room.
Everything else they showed that was great just felt a little off and couldn't have as much impact as it was supposed to have because of that big part they left out at the beginning.
Conclusion
It has a high rating:
And that's certainly due to the good things I mentioned about it earlier, but if it had just that extra bit of the main character's rise it would have been an even better movie that would require a lot better status than it currently has.
Maybe some critics do not see that as subtracting much from the movie, but I do, and objectively that does subtract too because how do you show a struggling man trying to get to the top and all of a sudden he is at the top but you didn't show how, you simply just show what he does at the top. Nah, the climb is very important to a story about a climb.
The End
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