Edward Zwick’s Blood Diamond opens in 1999 Sierra Leone, where the Revolutionary United Front is tearing the country apart and forcing locals to mine the stones that pay for the war. Solomon Vandy, a Mende fisherman from Shenge, is pulled from his family and put to work under Captain Poison. In the river, Vandy finds an enormous pink diamond, buries it when government troops raid the site, and lands in a Freetown jail next to Danny Archer, a Rhodesian gunrunner caught smuggling stones into Liberia.
Trailer, via HD Retro Trailers.
A Fisherman, a Smuggler, and a Pink Stone
Archer gets them both freed because he needs the diamond and Vandy needs his family. Archer wants to sell the stone to Rudolph van de Kaap, a corrupt Afrikaner mining executive, and retire. Colonel Coetzee, his employer at a private military company, wants it instead, as payment for the botched Liberia run.
DiCaprio plays Archer; Djimon Hounsou plays Vandy. Jennifer Connelly is Maddy Bowen, an American journalist who trades passage to Kono for Archer’s evidence on the illicit trade.
What the Film Puts on Screen
The rebels amputate civilians’ hands to keep them from voting, and the film stages it. Vandy’s son Dia is taken by the RUF and conscripted as a child soldier under Captain Poison. After the RUF takes Freetown, Archer and Vandy escape to Lungi and plan to reach Kono with Maddy’s help.
Charles Leavitt and C. Gaby Mitchell wrote the script. The film runs 143 minutes. The title refers to blood diamonds — stones mined in war zones and sold to finance conflicts, profiting warlords and diamond companies worldwide.
The Kimberley Ending
The closing conference on conflict diamonds points to a real meeting in Kimberley, South Africa, in 2000. That meeting led to the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, which tried to certify the origin of rough diamonds to curb the trade in conflict diamonds. The scheme has been mostly abandoned as ineffective.
Here is how the release stacked up:
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| December 8, 2006 | Released by Warner Bros. Pictures |
| 2006 | Five Oscar nominations announced |
| 2006 | DiCaprio nominated, Golden Globe Best Actor – Drama |
The film grossed $171.7 million worldwide against a $100 million budget. It received five Oscar nominations, including Best Actor for DiCaprio and Best Supporting Actor for Hounsou. DiCaprio also received a nomination for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama.
Where the Movie Slips
The film’s critical score sits at 6.4 out of 10, with a Metacritic score of 64 out of 100.
The plot spreads across several threads:
- Vandy’s search for his family after the RUF takes his son.
- Archer’s attempt to recover the pink diamond and sell it to van de Kaap.
- Coetzee’s claim on the diamond as payment for the failed Liberia smuggling run.
- Maddy Bowen’s reporting on the illicit diamond trade.
- The Kimberley conference on conflict diamonds.
The film received positive reviews, with praise directed toward the performances of DiCaprio and Hounsou.
What the Nominations Bought
Blood Diamond is a 2006 American war drama directed and co-produced by Edward Zwick and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Connelly and Djimon Hounsou. It is set during the Sierra Leone Civil War and depicts a country torn apart by the struggle between government loyalists and insurgent forces.
The film’s ending, in which a conference is held concerning blood diamonds, refers to the historic Kimberley meeting. The Kimberley Process sought to certify the origin of rough diamonds; it has been mostly abandoned as ineffective.
The nominations for DiCaprio and Hounsou are the ones the Academy handed out. The praise in the reviews went to those two performances, and the box office returned $171.7 million against a $100 million budget. That is the record.
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