2.5-3.5 stars.  143 min.  Fiction: Historical Drama.  Stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Amajou Hansou, and Jennifer Connally. 

       "Blood diamonds" are diamonds purchased for or with money or armaments by rebels or dictators using them in violent conflicts.  Historically, they are a late-20th century phenomenon in countries such as Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Congo, and elsewhere, where they have funded perhaps as much as one billion dollars of armaments for rebels who maim and kill recklessly. 

       The movie Blood Diamond is about one such diamond found in Sierra Leone.  The main character, a white man (Leonardo DiCaprio) from a highly dysfunctional South African family, acts as a sort of dark version of Indiana Jones in trying to take it from the Sierra Leonean who has found it, thus enabling himself--and his rich, diamond-company patron to become even more wealthy.

       Nationally, some critics have praised this movie highly, and in fact Leonardo DeCaprio received an Oscar for this acting in this film.  However, other critics have panned it.  This bifurcation has occurred among audiences, too: some are spellbound by the story while others laugh at the violence at inappropriate times.  Part of the problem may be that the violence is so unusual that students think of it as ridiculously overdramatized; another problem may be that the movie has such an historical sweep that watcher may have difficulty understanding or following the broad storyline or may find it boring. 

       However, once you realize that all the violence depicted actually is underplayed, compared to the real thing--and once you know even a little about the background of African war and/or "blood diamonds"--the movie becomes a powerful and very realistic depiction of an important part of recent history in West Africa.  The movie shows how the trade of rough diamonds from Sierra Leone, West Africa, which produces about 3% of the world's diamonds, contributed substantially to that country's terrible civil war in the 1990s.  The film is set in 1999 and starts with extreme, gruesome violence of the kind that receives "X" ratings in Europe (but only "R" ratings in the U.S.).  It shows, in detail, villagers getting their hands and arms chopped off and young children operating AK-47 machine guns.  The story line features a simple villager (Amajou Hansou) who, when forced by the rebel army to dig for diamonds, finds a diamond of great value.  In order to save his family, he tries to smuggle the gem out of the country with the help of a European diamond smuggler (Leonardo DiCaprio).  

        The movie clearly is an action film.  Its violent scenes accurately reflect individual and journalistic accounts of Sierra Leone's lengthy civil war--and the brutal wars in many other third-world countries since the advent on the gun market of cheap, light, plentiful, and easy-to-use machine guns and other weapons of wars after the dismantling of the Soviet Union.  The international diamond trade has since made trading in "blood diamonds" harder by instituting the Kimberly Process Certification program, but some such trade still exists--estimates range from 1-5%--and, more importantly, violence like that shown in the movie continues on in other third-world countries every day, often fueled by other rich--if less flashy--resources.

        A good companion film to watch is the History Channel's 100 min. documentary Blood Diamonds, a dramatic, accurate journalistic account of the current trade in--and history of--blood diamonds in Sierra Leone, next-door Liberia, the Congo, and a few other diamond-producing African nations, along with a history of how the DeBeers Company used "diamonds are forever" and other slogans to build what once was a small market for them into the huge market there is today.  Half or more of the film is specifically about Sierra Leone, and as such it serves as an excellent historical and visual background for the recent civil war in Sierra Leone.