THE SUM OF ALL MARKETING MAKERS OF 'FEARS' HOLD THEIR BREATH OVER POST-SEPT. 11 AUDIENCE.

Byline: - Bob Strauss

As if there wasn't already enough to worry about ...

``The Sum of All Fears,'' the latest movie about Tom Clancy's super CIA agent Jack Ryan, comes out today in the wake of grave government pronouncements about more inevitable terrorist attacks on America, up to and including a possible nuclear incident.

Those who haven't read the book or seen the movie's television ads and want to be surprised should stop reading now.

Spoiler warning

For the rest, we'll note that, of all the films whose audience perception could theoretically be affected by Sept. 11 and its aftermath, ``Sum'' is the most unnerving.

When its centerpiece event - a dirty bomb going off at a packed Baltimore Super Bowl game - occurs, preview audiences have been stunned into rapt silence for the rest of the picture.

Others, at least according to unconfirmed test screening reports dating as far back as last November, have been unpleasantly freaked out.

``The movie changed without changing a frame,'' says Ben Affleck, who replaces Harrison Ford as a younger, callower version of Ryan in the new entry. ``We shot an escapist political thriller, and we ended up releasing a drama.''

Filmed during the winter and spring of 2001, ``Sum'' posits an international fascist conspiracy that wants to push America and Russia into nuclear war. Its members employ a long-lost Israeli atomic missile that some unsuspecting Syrians discover and sell to the highest bidder. Unlike in the book, which also involved Palestinian and American Indian radicals, that's been the full extent of Arab involvement in the script since before shooting began.

Despite such changes - done, the filmmakers claim, to avoid then-stereotypical, though now genuinely frightening, extremist Muslim movie villains - the film still hits mighty close to home. That's something director Phil Alden Robinson, producer Mace Neufeld and co-screenwriter Daniel Pyne are all eminently aware of - if not too concerned about, at least in public.

``As you can imagine, we tested the film extensively after Sept. 11,'' says Robinson, a longtime student of international affairs best-known in movie circles for directing the sentimental favorite ``Field of Dreams.'' ``What the audience has told us is that a year ago, they would have looked at this as a good popcorn movie, and today, they look at it as drama.''

``Fortunately, I think Phil really directed and shot it in a way that is realistic and respectful,'' observes Affleck, whose home is eight blocks away from Lower Manhattan's ground zero. ``It's not gratuitous; this is not like a big disaster for the sake of spectacle and eye candy. It's done in a way that tries to imagine what it would really be like.''

Gauging reaction

But how much of that is too much now? Only paying moviegoers know for sure. Robinson, however, says he tried to be cognizant of such taste matters even when it wasn't as emotional an issue.

``The danger is not knowing where the line is,'' the director explains. ``If you get too close to reality, it's really uncomfortable. If you get too far away, it's just not involving. So the struggle - and it starts in the screenplay - is how do you get close enough so that the audience takes it seriously, but still have enough distance so the audience moves forward and works with you instead of leaning back because they've been repulsed.''

Citing walkout statistics of less than 2 percent, producer Neufeld denies reports of serious test audience objections. He has, however, made enough of Clancy's geopolitically astute novels into films to know that there's always a risk to basing entertainment on apocalyptic possibilities, no matter how unthinkable.

``It was a chancy subject; we knew that when we were making the film, actually exploding a nuclear device in America,'' Neufeld admits. ``Now, after the big event in the movie, nobody moves, no one leaves to go to the bathroom. So the audience had changed; the film didn't.''

A film for our times?

``Everybody should find this disturbing,'' Affleck asserts. ``Violence in movies and on television should disturb you. That should be the point of it; it shouldn't be done just to make a big splash and have everyone ooh and aah at countless thousands of deaths. That may be one of the transitions we've made, in that we no longer look at that in such a flip way. This movie asks you to look at it in a real way and consider it.''

In the end, it is only a movie. But perhaps, ``The Sum of All Fears'' could be one of those movies that winds up representing a moment in America's political psyche, much as ``Dr. Strangelove'' and ``Fail-Safe'' did theirs.

``Movies are so totally overwhelmed in contrast to real, profound events that happen in the world to the point of being made nearly irrelevant, obviously,'' Affleck points out. ``But what's interesting about it, if you were to look at it like an anthropologist from 100 years in the future, you might say that this is a good indicator of how people imagined that they would have dealt with a terrorist attack in the United States immediately preceding when one, in fact, took place.''