Books, Movies and Random Thoughts

Lord of War was one of those films that covers a long timeframe, so there’s really not a lot of sustained and detailed character development. Instead, you get lots of little bits, and you have to fill in the blanks yourself. Generally, this doesn’t really work for me. Similarly, the picture of the arms trade was very “bitty”, and when you add this to the fact that the main character was a pretty unpleasant person, the film didn’t really have a great deal to grab me.

The thing that did lift it, though, was the voiceover. The world-weary, ironic approach was curiously engaging, and did pull the film into a single, coherent whole, rather than just a series of connected bits.