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When Lieutenant A.K. Waters (Bruce Willis) and his crack team of Navy Seals chopper back to their home base, an aircraft carrier stationed off the coast of Africa, his commanding officer, Captain Bill Rhodes (Tom Skerritt), awaits with another mission. The team is to infiltrate war torn Nigeria and evacuate from a remote village four Americans including Doctor Lena Fiore Kendricks (Monica Bellucci). The country is no longer safe for anyone but members of the tribal group that has seized power by assassinating the president and his family. The team parachutes in at night from high altitude and melts into the jungle.

What they find is not what they expect. A priest and two nuns minister to about seventy maimed and wounded; they refuse to leave. Doctor Kendricks, who applied all her medical skills to treat her patients, survivors of rebellion and brutal ethnic cleansing, also refuses to leave her crude hospital unless she can take those who are mobile with her. The hardened Walters reluctantly agrees to bring those capable of reaching the landing zone. She assumes that he'll extract them as well, but it's a ploy simply designed to persuade her to accompany the Seals to the LZ.

As they trek through the dense jungle, avoiding heavily armed rebels, Walters is subliminally affected by Kendricks' passionate care for the hapless refugees. By the time he forces her into the chopper at the LZ, abandoning her charges to the jungle and the patrolling troops, he finds himself violating a rule he's followed for over two decades of harsh service. He begins to "give a fuck." As their chopper passes over the site of a massacre, he relents and orders them back. The wounded and the children are loaded onboard to be flown out. He, his team, and the good doctor will proceed on foot until another extraction can be arranged. He contacts Rhodes with a satellite phone but the airspace over Nigeria has become too hot and air operations have been temporarily shut down. Walters has no choice; they will make their way to Cameroon and seek safety across its border.

It's at this point that the filmmakers expose the harsh reality of violent brutality. The team comes upon a massacre in progress, a village of people being systematically tortured, raped, maimed, shot, and burnt alive. Walters violates his ordered rules of engagement and attacks the slaughterers. The team is now fully committed, both emotionally and physically. But as they push back into the jungle, they make a disturbing discovery. On a combat hardened laptop, satellite derived infrared images reveal that they are being tracked and followed by a significant force. Substantially outnumbered, the Seals must fight to protect the refugees and survive. Few will.

Some might be tempted to criticize the combat climax as a sellout to Hollywood sensibilities and the demands of commerce. But without the Seals' willingness to risk their lives for the refugees, neither they nor the audience will make the emotional commitment the filmmakers seek. Director Antoine Fuqua and screenwriters Alex Lasker and Patrick Cirillo have constructed an emotionally involving drama that ramps up slowly to greater and greater action. They skillfully draw the viewer into the plight of those caught up in mindless slaughter, then unleash the skills of a team of outnumbered Seals. Two standout performances must be mentioned. Bruce Willis is thoughtful and introspective. There is none of the smirky bravado found in some of his other action flicks. In Tears of the Sun, he shines as a character actor rather than a star. And Monica Bellucci projects great emotional depth, able to communicate with equal skill exclusively with her eyes or with believable physicality.

Video: How Does The Disc Look?

The film's theatrical aspect ratio of 2.40:1 is presented in anamorphic video. This Columbia TriStar release has surprisingly few halos; those that are perceptible are not at all intrusive. Cinematographer Mauro Fiore has created a psychologically sharp film with slightly exaggerated contrast and stark detail. It's conveyed surprisingly well, with fine small object detail and skin textures. The transfer actually looks better than some of the Superbit titles I've reviewed; I wish I could have checked the bit rate, but I replaced my Sony DVP-S7000 with a Denon DVD-9000 months ago. Color rendition based on natural flesh tones and the lush green vegetation of a Hawaiian tropical rain forest (the surrogate for a Nigerian jungle) is first-rate. Some slight softness exists in some highly complex long and medium shots; perhaps some video filtering was used to help the compression. I noticed no blocking or mosquito noise artifacts. Nicely done.

Audio: How Does The Disc Sound?

The Dolby Digital 5.1 track is terrific. Not since the early firefight in Rules of Engagement (coincidentally, the preliminary title for this flick) have I heard as aggressive a use of the surround channels. From gunfire to jungle ambiance to a tropical rainstorm, the viewer is fully immersed in sound. EX decoding perfectly spreads the directional cues and the distributed sounds across and around the full 180 degrees of surround field. This is a very well mixed track. Sound effects have an unrestrained punch, both from small arms and more devastating weapons. Very deep bass is present - a thunderstorm is reasonably convincing - but it doesn't quite reach the resonant frequency of my anal sphincter. The fine score by Lisa Gerrard and Hans Zimmer is less bombastic than is usually created by those composers; the motifs are heavily influenced by African themes and are more poignant than combative. The sound is quite fine, spread across a broad soundstage. The dialog is distortion free, with none of the harshness sometimes caused by lossy compression.

The audio is supported by subtitles in Parisian- French and English, for which Closed Captions are also included.

Supplements: What Goodies Are There?

There are two (sometimes) screen-specific commentary tracks on this DVD. Director Antoine Fuqua offers some observations about casting, difficult working conditions, actors' boot camp, and production details. However, his passion for the issue, the cruel violence wracking the African continent, becomes a dominant mantra. It is superfluous; the work speaks for itself, and more elegantly. The Writers' Observations track features Alex Lasker and Patrick Cirillo. They describe the history of the story concept and the historical context of the story. We learn that it took quite some time to get this screenplay made. The timing could not be more serendipitous, for as the film was being released, violence was escalating in Nigeria. The writers immediately impress by being more informative than the director but they apparently don't have that much to say, for they bid us good-bye after about seventeen and a quarter minutes.

Africa Fact Track is a factoid-based subtitle feature that displays information about the making of the film, the players, the story arcs, and the historical and current event context. It's highly informative and if you have the ability to multitask, I'd recommend enabling this supplement as you listen to the director's commentary. That will save you a couple of hours.

The featurette is entitled Journey to Safety: The Making of Tears of the Sun (15:04). Cast and crew are interviewed. We learn a bit more about the boot camp, the casting of survivors of the African violence and how the filming affected them, and the bonding that took place as a result of the emotional reactions of the refugees. Yes, there is a bit of mutual backslapping, but the inspiration for the film takes precedence.

Voices of Africa is conceptually similar to the Steven Spielberg project intended to film and record holocaust survivors from the Nazi death camps. There are eight quick brief interviews in which African survivors describe how ethnic and tribal violence affected them and their families. This is a touching and effective punctuation to the fictional drama. There are eight Deleted Scenes, which may be played sequentially or individually. The scenes amplify points made by other sequences and interactions within the theatrical cut. Some add another level of gruesome realism. None are badly done, but none would have substantially improved the flow of the film. The Interactive Map of Africa allows you to select from among ten cities/regions in Nigeria. A text screen will then appear with one-page of text describing the historic and current conflict at that location.

To balance this poignant material, Columbia TriStar has included a mostly lighthearted tangle of trailers; some are available on DVD, some haven't reached the motion picture theater yet. You'll find Tears of the Sun, Anger Management, Bad Boys II, Basic, Black Hawk Down, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, Hollywood Homicide, Radio, and S.W.A.T. The 121-minute feature is organized into twenty-eight chapters.

DVD-ROM Exclusives: What do you get when you pop the disc in your PC?

No ROM extras have been included.

Parting Thoughts