Oughts From the Aughts: Lord of War (2005)
My favorite underrated gems from the 2000s, explained in under 2010 words
“There are over 500 million fire arms in the worldwide circulation. That is one firearm for every twelve people on the planet. The only question is: how do we arm the other eleven?”-Yuri Orlav
What’s the perfect way to begin a movie?
Some of the most iconic movies ever made hook us from the first frame—Spielberg’s harrowing Normandy beach landing in Saving Private Ryan, Nolan’s meticulously chaotic bank heist in The Dark Knight, or that unforgettable trunk scene in Goodfellas.
Good movies hit the ground running, making every second of screen time count.
So what’s the best way to handle the opening credits, then? Can the obligatory and often fast-forwarded title crawl be both entertaining and crucial to advancing your story’s themes and conflicts? Absolutely, and this alone is a good reason to watch Lord of War.
It opens with a clever and incisive opening montage tracking the life of a bullet to the tune of “For What It’s Worth” by Buffalo Springfield. This narrative device lets us visualize the contours of the global arms trade, from the point of view of one bullet, from the factory to the forehead of a child soldier. It’s a short film that kicks off the much longer film and it’s gripping, educational, and damning all at once.
Thus begins my favorite Nicolas Cage performance of all time.
I didn’t say the best performance.
I said my favorite.
As I explored in my take on The Last Samurai, I’m drawn to hyperbolic actors saying “And now, for something completely different.”
It may be hard to remember now, but Nic Cage wasn’t always such a punchline. Before the montage of him freaking out that gave us “How’d it get burned” and “NOT THE BEES,” he was a serious actor. Before Ghostrider, the movie that got me to hate comic book movies before it was trendy, Cage was one of the most in demand leading men out there. Before his financial troubles that made him start saying yes to every role pitched at him, he was selective about the type of projects he would star in. Another good reason to watch this movie is to transport yourself to an era when two hour, mid-budget dramas were the norm and Nicolas Cage wasn’t yet a meme.
Here, he plays as Uri Orlav, a Ukranian immigrant to New York who seeks his fortune in the world of arms dealing in the 1980s alongside his reckless brother played by Jared Leto. While the entirety of Lord of War doesn’t quite live up to the polish of the opening sequence, it’s still remarkably re-watchable nearly two decades later.
The most noticeable aspect of this film is its style— halfway between an extended montage and a documentary film. In lesser hands this would feel forced. However Cage and director Andrew Niccol are not lesser hands.
Like a splendidly written New Yorker or Atlantic article, what works best about Lord of War is how well it immerses you in a world you’d never see otherwise, confidently zipping you through time and space while pausing to snack on factoids. This all works thanks to the very clever script and several very inventive sequences.
The style is also the source of its most glaring weaknesses. It heavily relies on narration to advance the plot, which spoon feeds you information as well as the appropriate emotional reaction. The characters are fairly predictable and one-note. Jared Leto is only here to make us feel sad, a role he’d really lean into (intentionally or otherwise) later in his career. The West African characters are woefully reductive, limited to stereotypical warlords.
The soundtrack is simultaneously awesome and telegraphs what’s going on more than the narration does, even more on the nose than the literal cocaine being snorted in a montage over, what else, “Cocaine” by Eric Clapton.
The gang’s all here. “Glory Box” by Portishead plays over a seduction scene, a getting rich sequence is accompanied by “Money (That’s What I Want” by the Flying Lizards, and the fall from grace sequence takes place to “Hallelujah” by Jeff Buckley.
All that’s missing is a Vietnam sequence over “Fortunate Son” by Creedence Clearwater Revival or a shooting over “Hide and Seek” by Imogen Heap (oh wait, SNL did that already).
Armchair nitpickers have shown up in the chat to rightly remind us that this is not the most accurate and educational depiction of the arms trade out there. True— for that you’ll have to watch part one and two of Johnny Harris’s video essay series on Youtube.
Yet, while consuming Harris’s work feels like listening to a long-winded dad explaining the hours of eBay trawling it took to track down and assemble all ten thousand components of his prized train set, Lord of War has the bouncy flair of a music video.
This is just a much more engaging way to consume very similar information.
Not only does this fictional take on the arms trade deliver important truths with panache, the backstory of this film speaks volumes about the real world of the arms trade.
While filming this, director Andrew Niccol realized it was cheaper to buy real guns than props. The 3,000 AK-47s shown on screen were real. Niccol said he found it disturbingly easy to buy so many firearms.
The sequence depicting Yuri flying a transport plane full of weapons entailed borrowing the plane from a real arms dealer. For another sequence, they gathered fifty T-72 tanks, which required them to notify NATO ahead of time, lest they believe the reports of an arms build up in the Czech Republic via satellite.
This film is confident, stylish, and almost fun at times, but it can’t escape the depressing gravitas of the subject matter. Rewatching it, I couldn’t help but wonder if the jarring contrast between the film’s slick style and its grim subject matter was deliberate. The moral dissonance evoked by the stylish edits and pitch-perfect needle drops is disorienting and ultimately devastating.
Describing the saga of Guns N’ Roses in 60 Songs That Explain the 90s, Rob Harvilla notes how for hair metal bands of that era, their rock bottom looked a whole lot like them being ontop of the world.
Similarly, Orlav’s rise to power looks a lot like a descent into madness.
Like Walter White in Breaking Bad, Yuri Orlav is an eminently watchable anti-hero navigating a profoundly ambiguous world, driven by the quintessentially American pursuit of profit and self-interest. His ascent through a huge and unsavory black market makes us want to look for the distance between our lives and choices and his, only to find that maybe there isn’t as much as we’d hoped.
After all, this is a rags to riches tale of someone who profits off of death and destruction, which would be a lot easier for us to condemn from the safe distance of 2024 if it wasn’t such a big part of the world we all live in. Maybe the sharply dressed executives at Lockheed Martin and Raytheon aren’t so different from the Yuri Orlavs of the world. Like the Sackler family demonstrated with Oxycontin, even if you deny intending to profit off of pain, the suffering and death you inflict are just as real and just as permanent.
Lagunitas Brewing’s slogan is beer speaks, people mumble.
This film makes it evident that a more honest slogan for the modern world would be: Money talks— guns scream.
This nearly 20-year-old film has only gained poignance as time has passed.
If the exchange of weapons were indeed a conversation, we are living through a cacophonous era right now.
Even the most glaring shortcomings of Lord of War are, in my book at least, absolved by the plain reality that arms dealing is bigger, more destructive, and sadder than what’s shown here. As the closing credits make clear, the biggest arms dealers in the world are the five permanent members of the UN Security Council: The United States, The United Kingdom, Russia, China, and France.
Reality, time and time again, has proven to be more heavy handed than this movie.
Cage’s character of Yuri Orlav was based on several real people including Victor Bout, an infamous Russian arms dealer. Like Orlav, he took advantage of the chaos after the collapse of the Soviet Union to re-sell Cold War weaponry around the world. He provided arms to warlords in Afghanistan, Angola, and Liberia. Like Orlav, he evaded authorities thanks to multiple identities and a sophisticated supply chain network that would make both El Chapo and Walmart envious. Bout ran guns to conflict zones around the world until he was arrested by the US in 2008. Like Orlav, even after being captured, he found a way to elude true justice.
When the US needed to get WNBA player Brittney Griner back from a Russian prison, which high profile prisoner did they need to trade for her?
Victor Bout, also nicknamed the merchant of death.
Now that’s an ending.