Sum doesn't add up: besides its faulty casting and poor production quality, the movie The Sum of All Fears subversively promotes U.S.-Russian convergence in the name of fighting terrorism. (Cultural Currents).

Devouring over $30 million at the box office during its first weekend in theaters, the movie adaptation of Tom Clancy's novel The Sum of All Fears has been praised for its timeliness and supposed realism. Advance screenings of the film, which depicts a terrorist nuclear strike on Baltimore, were held for policymakers and opinion molders. Every effort was made to impress upon the mind of the movie-going public that this is no ordinary film; instead, it is a preview of our likely future.

In the novel, published in 1991, Clancy depicted a conspiracy of Muslim terrorists collaborating with other elements of the Soviet-created international Terror Network. The fictional cabal, which included a member of the Red Army Faction and an American Indian radical previously involved in the "Warrior Society," detonated a nuclear bomb at Denver's Mile High Stadium during the Super Bowl. (In the film, the bomb detonates in Baltimore.)

While this premise all but begged for a big-screen treatment, Hollywood's Sensitivity Commissars dictated changing the villains' identities. Accordingly, in the film the plot is carried out by a ring of shadowy European neo-Nazis working in tandem with a white South African arms dealer and an embittered American white supremacist. In Clancy's novel, the terrorist plot was underwritten by the Ayatollah Mahmoud Haji Daryaei, an Iranian radical who eerily prefigured Osama bin Laden (remember, the novel was published over a decade ago). In the film, Daryaei was replaced by unctuous neo-Nazi industrialist Richard Dressier (Alan Bates), unmistakably a caricature of Austrian libertarian politician Joerg Haider.

Adolf Hitler, Dressler informs his followers, "wasn't a madman -- he was stupid. He fought America and Russia, instead of letting them fight one another." Dressier intends to frame the Russians for the nuclear attack on Baltimore, and bribe a Russian air base commander to stage an attack on a U.S. aircraft carrier. The ensuing U.S. retaliation would trigger a full-scale nuclear war, out of which a Fascist Phoenix would arise. The new Reich would be built by the radical right -- "neo-Nazis, Klansmen, Aryans," and the like -- who have supposedly created a global network through the Internet.

In both the novel and the film, the key component of the terrorist bomb is a plutonium warhead cannibalized from an Israeli bomb left over from the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The bomb was buried in a farm on the Golan Heights after a Syrian surface-to-air missile blows the jet carrying it out of the sky. In the movie, the Arab farmers who discover the unexploded bomb consider it a dud and sell it to a South African arms dealer for a pittance. Dressler pays the dealer an extravagant sum for the plutonium core and hires three Russian nuclear scientists to turn it into a weapon. Once the bomb is ready, Dressler ships it to Baltimore on a Ukrainian freighter, where a disaffected white supremacist dock worker picks it up and places it -- disguised as a vending machine -- in the parking lot of an NFL stadium.

As planned, the bomb detonates during the Super Bowl, vaporizing much of Baltimore and bringing the U.S. and Russia to the brink of nuclear war. Only the timely intervention of CIA analyst Jack Ryan (played by a badly miscast Ben Afflack) staves off the apocalypse.

Familiar Scenes, Faulty Casting

For a film described as a "thriller," The Sum of All Fears is surprisingly flaccid. The scene leading up to the nuclear blast provides the only truly gripping moments, and the blast itself is suitably horrifying. But the story is sabotaged by a meandering first act and a somewhat anticlimactic third act that revisits familiar territory from Cold War "hot line" dramas, such as the 1964 film Fail Safe and the 1982 television mini-series World War III.

Veteran moviegoers might also find themselves noting the number of scenes cribbed from other, better movies. For instance, a bomb disguised as a vending machine is featured in The X-Files movie. A sudden eruption of ringing cell phones and buzzing pagers interrupts a presidential address, heralding a crisis; the 1998 terrorism drama The Siege used a similar scene to much more chilling effect. A montage of revenge killings set to operatic music borrows heavily from The Godfather, Part III.

The movie's most serious flaws are exemplified in casting Ben Affleck as Jack Ryan, most recently played by Harrison Ford. Ryan is the moral center of Clancy's fictional universe. An ex-Marine-turned-CIA analyst eventually rising to become president of the United States, Jack Ryan embodies professionalism, rectitude, and sober patriotism. A devout Catholic husband and father, the Jack Ryan portrayed in Clancy's novels is capable of ruthlessness in defending his home and country, but in all things he strives to follow the moral laws prescribed by the Bible and Christian tradition.

In the novel version of The Sum of All Fears, Ryan actually prevents the president from launching a nuclear attack on the Iranian city of Qum, where Ayatollah Daryaei resides. "You're willing to slaughter a whole city ... because your pride is hurt, and you want to get even," Ryan chastises the president. "You need a better reason than that to kill people. I've had to do that. I have killed people. You want this man killed, we can do it, but I'm not going to help you kill a hundred thousand others just to take out the one man you want." Here Ryan invokes critical moral principles contained in the Christian "Just War" tradition. In a later novel entitled Executive Orders, President Jack Ryan victoriously applies the same principles in dealing with Daryaei, who launches an all-out terrorist assault on the United States.

Harrison Ford, who played Ryan in two installments of the film series (Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger), portrayed Jack Ryan as a grown-up Boy Scout: An honorable, capable man who remains committed to principle even in the shadowy world of counter-intelligence.

Decades younger than Ford, Affleck plays Ryan at the beginning of his CIA career -- but nothing in his portrayal suggests a character of exceptional depth, insight, or abilities. Where Ford radiated confidence and authority, Affleck is callow, superficial, and forgettable in the role.

Inverted Morals, Subversive Message

In their film, director Phil Alden Robinson (a counter-culture activist who has collaborated on documentaries with the United Nations) and screenwriters Paul Attanasio and Daniel Pyne inverted the moral universe created in Clancy's novels. Although he is the most successful exponent of the "techno-thriller" genre, Clancy's chief appeal is his unabashed admiration for brave, competent men who volunteer for dangerous but indispensable tasks: Warriors, obviously, but also police, firemen, rescue workers, and intelligence operatives. In Clancy's universe, the "squares" make the modem world work, and their latent heroism is revealed in crisis situations. The heroes of Black Tuesday -- firemen and police at Ground Zero, the men of United Flight 93 -- could have been taken from the pages of Clancy's fiction.

The movie version of The Sum of All Fears deliberately subverts this message. Jack Ryan is a shallow, bed-hopping GenXer; his associates at the CIA sport dreadlocks, retro-beatnik style goatees, and other MTV culture stigmata. In a speech at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, President Fowler (James Cromwell) blithely recalls how "as a young Marine in Vietnam, I smoked marijuana on several occasions" -- a comment that takes a gratuitous dig at veterans while reinforcing the notion that the leftist counter-culture has won the Gramscian "war of position" in our society.

But these aesthetic sins pale into insignificance beside the genuinely subversive message of the retooled storyline (which Clancy must have approved, since he earned a co-Executive Producer credit for the film): A merger between the United States and post-Soviet Russia is needed to wipe out the global "right-wing menace" that threatens to destroy us all. The film's coda shows "wet work" specialists from the CIA and the KGB working on various fronts to roll up the neo-Nazi terrorist network.

This "solution" to the global terrorism threat is even more terrifying than the shock wave that leveled Baltimore. While many commentators have suggested that the film's portrayal of nuclear terrorism may prove prophetic, few if any have mentioned that the film came out during the very week that Russia became a full partner with NATO, as part of a global "antiterrorism" alliance -- which means that at least one of its predictions has been partially fulfilled.