The Sum of All Fears (film)

In 1991, Paramount Pictures negotiated with Tom Clancy for the rights to adapt The Sum of All Fears, but the talks stalled after he became reluctant to concede film rights to further works due to his dissatisfaction with the adaptation of Patriot Games.[4] Clancy ultimately agreed after he reached a large cash settlement with the studio president Brandon Tartikoff. However, producer Mace Neufeld was not enthusiastic to adapt the book after the release of Clear and Present Danger in 1994 due to its similarities with the story of Black Sunday and concerns over depicting controversial subjects such as terrorism and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.[5] A year was spent developing Tom Clancy's The Cardinal of the Kremlin before the material was deemed too difficult to adapt.[6] An adaptation of Debt of Honor or a new screenplay unrelated to any of Clancy's books was also considered.[5]

In October 1999, Harrison Ford announced that the next Jack Ryan novel being scripted into a film would indeed be The Sum of All Fears and that "hopefully we'll get that to a place where we can make a movie."[7] During this time, writer Akiva Goldsman wrote multiple drafts of the script.[8] However, on June 8, 2000, it was announced that Ford had dropped out of the film after he and director Phillip Noyce were unable to work out script problems.[9] It was later announced that Ben Affleck would take on the role in a $10 million deal that would see the series rebooted with Jack Ryan portrayed at an earlier stage in life. "The day I received the offer to play Jack Ryan, I was filming a Pearl Harbor scene with Alec Baldwin. He was very sweet and said I should do it," said Affleck. "I wouldn't have done the movie without talking to Harrison Ford first. He gave me his blessing. That's what I needed to hear."[10] Months after Affleck became attached to the project, director Phil Alden Robinson was brought on to lead the project.[11]

While the basic plot is the same in the movie as in the book, there were significant changes. Noting these substantial changes, in the commentary track on the DVD release, Tom Clancy jokingly introduced himself as "the author of the book that he [director Phil Alden Robinson, who is present with Clancy] ignored" and spending most of the commentary poking fun at the film's factual inaccuracies and differences from the source material.[12] Perhaps the largest change were the original terrorists. In the novel, they were Arab nationalists, but in the film, they were changed to neo-fascists. A common misconception is that this was done as a reaction to the September 11, 2001, attacks, but the movie finished filming in June 2001.

On the "making-of" DVD extra, director Alden Robinson said that the change was purely for elements relating to the plot, because Arab terrorists would not be able to plausibly accomplish all that was necessary for the story to work. In addition, the terrorists in the book received significant aid from elements in East Germany, a country which had ceased to exist before the novel was even published. The group Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) did mount a two-year lobbying campaign that ended on January 26, 2001, against using "Muslim villains", as the original book version did.[13]

Olympic Stadium in Montreal, where the football game scenes were filmed

Screenwriter Dan Pyne claimed that the decision to not use Arab terrorists was "possibly because that has become a cliché. At the time that I started writing The Sum of All Fears, Jörg Haider was just starting to come into play in Austria. And simultaneous with that, I think, there was some neo-nationalist activity in Holland, and there was stuff going on in Spain and in Italy. So it seemed like a logical and lasting idea that would be universal."[14] It has also been noted that a larger percent of profits stems from international audiences, and American filmmakers work to avoid alienating large segments of this customer base.[14]

Principal photography for The Sum of All Fears began on February 12, 2001, in Montreal, Quebec.[15] A majority of the film was shot in Montreal, including the sequences at the football game that were shot in the city's Olympic Stadium.[16] Additional filming was done at the Diefenbunker in Ottawa, Ontario.[17] Production finished in June 2001.[6] The interior scene of the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis was filmed on a set used in the television series JAG.[18]

The musical score to The Sum of All Fears is composed by Jerry Goldsmith. A soundtrack album was released on June 4, 2002, by Elektra Records.[19] In addition to Goldsmith's score, the soundtrack also includes source music such as "If We Get Through This" by Tabitha Fair and "Nessun dorma" by Giacomo Puccini. There are also two tracks from the album ("If We Could Remember" and "The Mission") that are vocal interpretations of Goldsmith's primary theme co-written by singer-songwriter Paul Williams.[20] On March 12, 2014, an expanded edition was released by La-La Land Records.[21]

The film received mixed reviews. Rotten Tomatoes reported that 60% of critics gave the film positive reviews and that the average rating was 5.95/10 based on a total of 176 reviews counted. The consensus was that the film was "A slick and well-made thriller that takes on new weight due to the current political climate."[3] At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average out of 100 to critics' reviews, The Sum of All Fears received a score of 45 based on 35 reviews.[24]

Peter Travers criticized Affleck's performance, saying it "merely creates an outline for a role he still needs to grow into, a role that Harrison Ford effortlessly filled with authority."[25] Richard Roeper felt the film "is almost impossible to follow – and there's something cringe-inducing about seeing an American football stadium nuked as pop entertainment." Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune called it "an implausible apocalypse without depth or resonance",[26] while Peter Rainer of New York magazine felt the "movie has been upstaged by the sum of our fears."[27]

A few positive reviews came from The Argus, who praised Freeman for giving "the William Cabot character such validity."[29] Roger Ebert awarded the film 3.5 out of 4, stars and felt that "the use of the neo-Nazis is politically correct: Best to invent villains who won't offend any audiences." He also said that "Jack Ryan's one-man actions in post-bomb Baltimore are unlikely and way too well-timed."[28] Ebert was not alone in disparaging the politically-correct recasting of the novel's Arab terrorist villains into Neo-Nazis.[30][31]

In Reel Power: Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy, author Matthew Alford observed that the American political characters in the film act benevolently; declaring, "When the President and his advisers do apply force it is with heavy hearts and purely as a way of demonstrating 'deterrence' in the hope that this will encourage the Russians to back down. They never apply excessive violence and are ultimately successful – with Ryan’s help – in avoiding nuclear warfare." Furthermore, he argued that "the film celebrates and makes light of the enormous covert powers of a globally operating US national security state and its allies."[32]

Ed Gonzalez of Slant magazine took issue with the film's violent content, especially being released not long after the September 11 terrorist attacks.[33]

According to Box Office Mojo, the film made U.S. $118,907,036 and $75,014,336 in foreign totals, easily recovering its $68 million production costs.[2]

The film won a Visual Effects Society Award for "Best Supporting Visual Effects in a Motion Picture." The recipients were Glenn Neufeld, Derek Spears, Dan Malvin, and Al DiSarro.[34]