The Killing Fields

Audience Reviews

View More

Lorenz L @Lorenz1060 Apr 10 What was still topical and relevant in 1984 has not aged well. The first 105 minutes are basically incoherent chaos: there is not enough backstory to explain what we are watching more than 40 years later. The film opens in 1973 and then suddenly we are in 1975 without any clear knowledge of how we got there and why. Add the mix of languages, and the absence of subtitles for the long sequences spoken (or yelled) in the Khmer language, and when some semblance of narrative arrives, it is far too late for the confusing boredom we’ve been asked to endure. The acting from Sam Waterston and John Malkovich is decent, but never rises above adequate. We eventually learn the centre of the story is the life of Dith Pran, portrayed by non-professional actor Dr Haing S. Ngor (as he is billed in the credits). As harsh as this may sound, he was a Cambodian prisoner portraying a Cambodian prisoner. His win for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar seems to be based more in politics than in artistry. See more Per S @RT83737705 May 8 Unpleasantly realistic and crrently topical. See more Alain E @AlainE Apr 27 The achievement of this movie is to make a boring film about war. How critics who liked Apocalypse Now or the Deer Hunter approved of this mess? I watched 40 minutes that I will never get back. I am stuck in a hotel waiting for cardiac emergencies, so I saw the rest. The same impression. It runs for 2 hours? It could run for 6. The lesson: Khmer Rouge are bad, American journalists are good. In the final scene the Cambodian fixer reunites with the American reporter and I assume for what the director thought it conveyed emotional weight, stand twenty feet apart and look at each other, like adolescent girls. Curtain. On Tubi with reasonable amount of ads. See more jacob c @RT09118617 04/24/2025 The Killing Fields is a powerful, heartbreaking and harrowing biographical war drama that is brilliantly crafted and terrifically acted. See more Hugh J @RT93907031 12/19/2024 An emotional retelling of one of the darkest periods of Cambodian and global history. This film expertly portrayed the experience under the khmer rouge and did not shy away from the emotional and physical atrocities of war. See more Leonardo M @lmotta 12/07/2024 What a chaos. The first 40min of the film are fillers, with a sequence of events and a narrative that adds zero to the arch of the story for the latter 1h20 min. Then, the movie oscillates between some story and random depictions of war in Cambodia that again add nothing to the story arch. John Malkovich's character is seen most of the time just randomly taking photos in a hassle, there is not even a clear reason why. Despite the fact that they had to use film at the time, the photographer is never carrying film rolls or multiple cameras. The movie is mostly very unrealistic and doesn't really offer any glimpse into the war, the state of Cambodia at the time, the invasion the movie was supposed to depict or the journalists. There is very little dialogue, most of the time the characters are running on screen. See more Read all reviews

The Killing Fields

My Rating

Read More Read Less WRITE A REVIEW EDIT REVIEW POST RATING