(From my daily weblog, The Buddha Diaries)
Blood Diamond is not a film for the squeamish, or for those who avoid any kind of violence on the screen. The dreadful scenes of civil war depicted in the movie are shown in unsparing detail, with brother fighting pitilessly against brother, and with boy-children trained to kill innocent villagers mercilessly with the assault rifles put into their hands. Manipulated by corporate European diamond traders, these desperate people slaughter each other in pursuit of a global commodity that most of them never even see.
The redemption myth centers on the post-colonial adventurer played (extraordinarily well) by Leonardo di Caprio, whose cynicism and greed drive his quest for freedom through the wealth to which diamonds offer a desperate, violence-strewn path. He partners with an unwilling village fisherman whose family has been torn apart by war and who holds the secret to a spectacular fortune in the form of a diamond he has found and hidden in the African dirt.
The stated lesson of the film: don't buy one of these luxury baubles unless you can be sure it's not a conflict diamond--a stone that has been mined at the cost of human families destroyed by warfare, and of human blood. From a broader view, I saw the diamond as a metaphor for all of the earth's dwindling resources, and the film as sounding the alarm for worse violence and bloodshed to come as those resources become more scarce with time, and men more desperate to cull them for their own. Like the character played by di Caprio, we are at serious risk of sacrificing our humanity to our greed.