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3. How should the Christian church respond when it becomes aware of atrocities committed against civilians during civil wars? Should the church become involved? How should individual Christians respond when made aware of such atrocities
4. At the height of the civil war in Sierra Leone (and with many other wars raging), American television was dominated by coverage of the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal. Why do you think foreign crises get so little coverage?

Blood Diamond is rated R for strong violence and language. There are near-constant depictions of death by guns and knives, and some particularly disturbing and graphic re-enactments of hands being severed. The language is frequently profane.

Photos © Copyright Warner Bros. Pictures

© 2006, Carolyn Arends subject to licensing agreement with Christianity Today International. All rights reserved. Click for reprint information.

Due to his riveting work in The Departed, Leonardo DiCaprio may be one of the front-runners for the Best Actor award at the Oscars in a few months. He's winning more raves for his leading role in Blood Diamond, the new thriller from Edward Zwick (The Last Samurai).

And the movie itself is winning some praise too for its challenging attempt to teach audiences about the evils of the diamond trade, and the impact of consumerism in wealthy countries on the lives of the poor in Africa. But critics aren't entirely impressed with how the film illustrates that problem. And Christian critics are again troubled by so much violence on the big screen.

Carolyn Arends (Christianity Today Movies) says it's "an ambitious movie that aspires to combine mainstream, swash-buckling Hollywood entertainment with insightful psychodrama and serious social statement. Some viewers will wonder whether heavy problems like genocide, Western exploitation and the tragedy of child soldiers should be explored in a film that also uses carnage and conflict as a source of entertainment. Blood Diamond is so relentlessly violent that it runs the risk of desensitizing its audience to the very atrocities it aims to decry. At the beginning of the film I flinched at every act of brutality, but by its end I had seen so much death depicted that the images no longer had the same impact."

And yet, the film made her think. "Still, I left the film thinking about—and caring about—a country I had never seriously thought about before."

Steven Isaac (Plugged In) writes, "As the credits rolled and I walked out of the theater, I wasn't thinking about Leonardo DiCaprio's studiously performed accent, I was thinking about my own younger days of romance and how they were punctuated by the flash of a diamond solitaire. … Movies change the way people think. And intense, well-crafted, brooding, war movies do it more than most. … Blood Diamond screams out a protest that should be heard and well-heeded. How does it do it, though? With graphic, sometimes gratuitous images of violence, and obscene and profane language."

Mainstream critics are split over the film. Summarizing common complaints, Manohla Dargis (The New York Times) says, "If films were judged solely by their good intentions, this one would be best in show. Instead, gilded in money and dripping with sanctimony, confused and mindlessly contradictory, the film is a textbook example of how easily commercialism can trump do-goodism, particularly in Hollywood."

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