The Sum of All Fears (film)

''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 generally mixed reviews from critics. It is considered a major financial success, having a worldwide theatrical run of $193.9 million compared to its production budget of $68 million and related marketing costs.

Plot

In 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, an Israeli warplane carrying a nuclear bomb is shot down, falling into the Golan Heights, where the bomb gets buried in the desert. In 2002, a Syrian scrap collector uncovers the bomb buried in a field in the Golan Heights. He sells it to a South African black market arms trafficker named Olson, who recognizes it as a nuclear bomb. 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.

Just prior to this, in the United States, President Robert Fowler and his national security team, including CIA Director William Cabot, stage a war game scenario where Russian President Zorkin is overthrown in a coup and rogue generals launch a nuclear attack on the Americans. Shortly after the drill, Zorkin dies of a heart attack and is rapidly replaced by a seeming hardliner supported by the military, Alexander Nemerov.

CIA analyst Jack Ryan, who has studied Nemerov and believes him to be a reformer who merely talks like a hardliner to gain their support, is summoned by Cabot to accompany him to Moscow to inspect the top Russian nuclear weapons facility, in compliance with the START treaty. At the Kremlin, they meet Nemerov and his personal aide, former KGB agent Anatoly Grushkov. Nemerov requests they deliver a personal message to Fowler, asking him and the US to remain out of Russia's war in Chechnya and let Nemerov stabilize Russia in his own way. During their investigation of the weapons facility, Ryan notices the absence of three scientists listed on the facility's roster; Grushkov assures them the scientists are merely unavailable. After receiving reliable intelligence from a confidential secure informant (codenamed "Spinnaker“) inside the Kremlin disputing Grushkov's assessment, Cabot sends operative John Clark to Russia to investigate.

Tensions between the United States and Russia increase when a chemical attack on Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, is reported during the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Ryan tries to defend Nemerov by indicating that rogue military commanders could have ordered the attack instead, but his theory is disproved when Nemerov delivers a speech to the State Duma taking responsibility for the attack. In response, Fowler deploys peacekeepers to Chechnya. In Russia, Grushkov informs Nemerov that disgruntled Communist officers ordered the attack on Grozny, and Nemerov orders them removed from command, choosing to take the blame for Grozny rather than risk alienating more figures of his military.

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. 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 Fowler, about a bomb threat. Thanks to Ryan's warning, Cabot evacuates the president fast enough to get him out of the stadium before the detonation, but not fast enough for the motorcade to escape the bomb's shock wave. The stadium is destroyed, though Fowler is evacuated by the Marines; Cabot is mortally wounded and left behind. Gathering his national security team aboard a Boeing E-4, they conduct a real-life situation similar to the film's beginning but with far more confusion and heightened emotions from all those involved.
In Russia, President Nemerov desperately tries to defuse the situation over the hotline, but must face American assurance of Russian culpability and his own generals' desire to attack the US.

Immediately thereafter, a corrupt Russian Air Force general who has been bribed by Dressler sends warplanes to successfully attack a U.S. aircraft carrier, heavily damaging it; this further exacerbates tensions between Russia and the United States. On the scene of the blast in Baltimore, Ryan learns from a radiation assessment team that the isotopic signature from the nuclear blast indicates it was manufactured in the United States Department of Energy's Savannah River Site, evidence which apparently exonerates Russia. Ryan finds the injured Cabot, who before dying tells him to contact Spinnaker, his source in the Russian government. Using Cabot's recovered phone, Ryan contacts Spinnaker, who informs Ryan that the uranium was produced in an American facility and was stolen by the CIA in order to be secretly given to Israel (who subsequently lost it during the Yom Kippur War). Ryan tries to get a warning to President Fowler by phone, but is blocked by one of the President's team. In Syria, Clark tracks down Ghazi, one of the men who found the bomb, 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 who is behind the nuclear attack.

Ryan is able to reach the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon using Cabot's ID, and manages to get a message to Nemerov, using the personal rapport they had developed when they had met in Moscow and saying that he knows that Russia was not behind the attack. He asks Nemerov to stand down his forces as a show of good faith. Nemerov agrees to do so and Fowler follows suit. As Nemerov and Fowler sign an agreement to counter nuclear proliferation at the Kremlin, the participants in the conspiracy are tracked and assassinated: Clark sneaks into Olson's home in Damascus and slits his throat with a K-Bar knife. Russian agents chase the corrupt Russian general through snow covered woods and gun him down. Dressler, knowing he is being targeted as well, forces his aide to start his car. The car starts normally, to Dressler's relief. However, Grushkov knew Dressler liked to smoke in his car and had wired the car bomb to be detonated by the car's cigarette lighter as opposed to the ignition. As a result, Dressler is blown up when he presses the cigarette lighter button.

Later, Fowler and Nemerov deliver joint speeches about their new initiatives and honoring the dead at the White House, as Ryan and his now fiancée Dr. Catherine Muller listen in. Grushkov, revealing himself to be Spinnaker, arrives and offers to continue the arrangement he had with Cabot with Ryan, to ensure the back channels between Russia and the United States always remain open. He also gives Catherine a present for their engagement, which they notably had not yet announced to anyone. When Ryan asks him how he could have known, Grushkov merely shrugs, smiles and walks away.

Cast

Production

Development

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''. 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. A year was spent developing Tom Clancy's '' The Cardinal of the Kremlin'' before the material was deemed too difficult to adapt. An adaptation of '' Debt of Honor'' or a new screenplay unrelated to any of Clancy's books was also considered.

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." During this time, writer Akiva Goldsman wrote multiple drafts of the script. 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. 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." Months after Affleck became attached to the project, director Phil Alden Robinson was brought on to lead the project.

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 irector Phil Alden Robinson, who is present with Clancyignored" and spending most of the commentary poking fun at the film's factual inaccuracies and differences from the source material. 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.

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.

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." It has also been noted that a larger percent of profits stems from international audiences, and American filmmakers work to avoid alienating large segments of this customer base.

Filming

Principal photography for ''The Sum of All Fears'' began on February 12, 2001, in Montreal, Quebec. 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. Additional filming was done at the Diefenbunker in Ottawa, Ontario. Production finished in June 2001. The interior scene of the aircraft carrier '' USS John C. Stennis'' was filmed on a set used in the television series '' JAG''.

Music

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. 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. On March 12, 2014, an expanded edition was released by La-La Land Records.

Release

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.'" 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.

Reception

Critical response

''The Sum of All Fears'' received mixed reviews. Rotten Tomatoes reported that 60% of critics gave the film positive reviews and that the average rating was 5.95/10 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." 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.

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." 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", while Peter Rainer of ''New York'' magazine felt the "movie has been upstaged by the sum of our fears."

A few positive reviews came from '' The Argus'', who praised Freeman for giving "the William Cabot character such validity." 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." Ebert was not alone in disparaging the recasting of the novel's Arab terrorist villains as Neo-Nazis.

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 with Ryan’s 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."

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.

Box office

''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''. 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.

Awards

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.

See also

* 2002 in film
* ''The Sum of All Fears'' (video game)
* National Response Scenario Number One

References

External links

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Sum of All Fears (film), The
2002 films
2002 action thriller films
2000s spy thriller films
American action thriller films
American political thriller films
Films about neo-Nazism
Films about nuclear war and weapons
Films about terrorism
Films based on American novels
Films based on military novels
Films based on works by Tom Clancy
Films directed by Phil Alden Robinson
Films postponed due to the September 11 attacks
Films produced by Mace Neufeld
Films scored by Jerry Goldsmith
Films set in 1973
Films set in 2002
Films set in Baltimore
Films set in Russia
Films set in Ukraine
Films shot in Moscow
Films shot in Montreal
Films shot in Ottawa
Films shot in Baltimore
Films with screenplays by Paul Attanasio
Paramount Pictures films
Reboot films
Ryanverse films
Ukrainian-language films
2000s English-language films
2000s American films